Artist Collective
The Level Ground Artist Collective is a community of Los Angeles-based artists who share a desire to root our creative lives in experimentation, collaboration, and radical empathy with one another. We produce community-building programs for artists and audiences through collective organizing.
Lily Epps and Rebekah Neel are the Staff Artists who help organize the Collective. There are currently 39 artists in the Collective and you can meet them below.
If you are interested in joining the Artist Collective please reach out to our organizers at liliana@levelground.co and rebekah@levelground.co.
Featured Updates
It's been a whirlwind year at Level Ground! 2023 has seen us weather changes and challenges, exciting new partnerships, and emerging avenues for connection, care and visibility. And we couldn't have done it without the support and unending brilliance of our incredible community.
Level Ground Collective Artist Chance Calloway is a limitless talent—as a screenwriter, author, director and musician, his artistry and the influences that have shaped it are staggering.
On August 26 our amazing community gathered for brunch (at Superba in Hollywood for the foodies out there!) and everyone brought a few books for a show and tell.
Staff Artists Rebekah Mei and Leslie Foster are headed back to school, this time as educators. They’ve both been part of Level Ground from the very beginning (in 2013) and were our first volunteers to transition to part-time staff 5 years ago. In the last year, they’ve both started full-time jobs in education and are leaving the Level Ground staff team – but not our community!
Painter, musician, curator and all-around creative Langston Alimayu is chiefly concerned with honesty—in creativity, in community building, and within the art world as a whole. A self-taught native of Los Angeles, Langston pours that very energy of jovial, whimsical originality into every piece of work they bring to life.
Level Ground staff artist Rebekah Mei—a mother, sister, daughter, activist and familial archivist—is in an active state of creative unification. Unification, that is, in the linkages between lineage and domestic life, matriarchy and art, and feminine labor and motherhood.
POLARITY Curator, Bri Stokes, reflects on the inspiration and drive behind the biggest Level Ground group show to date.
Hello! My name is Liliana, Lily for short. I use she/they pronouns and I’m one of the Collective Organizers here at Level Ground.
Six artists from The Level Ground Collective will be exhibiting original art at the upcoming iteration of High Beams #4, this Saturday in the parking lot of the Torrance Art Museum.
In 2021, Community Manager Reneice Charles sees Level Ground shaping a just world for artists.
19 poets and filmmakers set to collaboratively create nine original short films for Level Ground's "Blooming in the Whirlwind.”
Level Ground seeks poets and filmmakers for a new Collect project called "Blooming in the Whirlwind.”
Though we don't know what the future holds, we're continuing our core work of building collaboration, fostering conversation, and sharing resources.
Collective Projects
Collaboration
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Experimentation
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Radical Empathy
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Collaboration • Experimentation • Radical Empathy •
Current Collective Artists
Bianca Nozaki-Nasser
Bianca is a cofounder of the Antiracist Classroom (@antiracistclassroom), Rad Organizing (radorganizing.com), and former core organizer at amwa (amwa.work). She has participated in several artist residencies including Activation Residency in New York and Level Ground in Los Angeles.
Foroozan Shirghani
Foroozan Shirghani (b. 1981. Tehran, Iran.), is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily with themes of fragility, suffering, pressure exerted on human body, memories attached to social and collective memory and the boundaries of human identity in her creation practice. Her work ranges from painting, sculpture, video, sewing, to building installation. They usually stems from personal experiences and mainly focus on psychological and socio-political issues especially in today’s individual and social life. Foroozan got her master’s degree in fine art from Iran in 2008. Her work has been featured in over 50 group shows around the world, a dozen publications and one solo exhibition. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Katayoun Bahrami
Katayoun Bahrami is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work reflects memories from her home country juxtaposed with her current reality. As an Iranian female artist, her research activities investigate the intersections of boundaries, identity, and women. Using memories from her past, Bahrami works through photographs, videos, textiles, and mixed-media works. Aspects of different locations, such as lakes, roads, or gardens, become the basis of her work to create a moment of reflection for the viewer. Farsi's handwriting also encompasses most of her art.
Rae Threat
rae is an internationally exhibited and published visual artist whose alternative bodies of work stems from their desire to invert stereotypes and challenge views. rae was the 2018 artist-in-residence and part of the 2020 community leadership program. they are an artist, brainstormer, maker of bath bombs, and event curator.
Ricardo Tomasz
Ricardo Tomasz is an artist in audio-scapes, photography, painting, collage, video, performance art, and occasionally body hair. He was born and raised in Hungary, to a Hungarian mother, and a Spaniard father. They died when he was 16, but their passing allowed him to tour and study at some of the finest Art Universities in Europe. He came to America, thrusting himself into the art scene. He was in and out, in and out, and in and out of America over several years, until finally settling in Los Angeles as an artist, designer, and occasional human crosswalk sign.
Sara Hassan Khani
Sara Hassan Khani (Tehran, Iran 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator based in Long Beach, California. She received her Master of Fine Arts at California State University Long Beach in Fall 2020 and her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the University of Tehran, Iran, in 2015. Her practice explores the concepts of time and memory and relationships between privacy, publicity, space, and the human body and investigates nonlinear and abstract narratives.
yétúndé olagbaju
yétúndé ọlágbajú is an artist, organizer, and educator currently residing on unceded Tongva land (Los Angeles, CA). They utilize video, sculpture, photography, gesture, and performance as through-lines for inquiries regarding Black labor, memory, legacy and processes of healing. They are rooted in the need to understand history, the people that made it, the myths and realities surrounding them, and how their own identity is implicated in history’s timeline. They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of the inaugural Nancy Cook Fellowship, the Jay Defeo award, the Murphy Cadogan award, and a Headlands Center for the Arts Fellowship. They are a member and co-founder of multiple Black and Brown liberation focused artist and worker-led collectives.
Amber Salik
Amber Nicole is a Vibe Curator, Narrative Photographer, Expressive Arts Counselor and Creative Wellness Coach located in Los Angeles, CA. As a freelance creative, her work mainly involves documenting and/or curating the lives and creative processes of diverse artists in her community. She specializes in documentary-style work, abstract expressionism and gritty realism, showcasing a blend of bold colors, dark shadows, abstractions of light, reflections and double exposures. Major themes revolve around identity, community, grief and transitional spaces.
Bri Stokes
Bri Stokes is a writer and poet who hails from South Central Los Angeles. She is a poetry and art editor with the London-based Hecate Magazine. Her work has been featured in BuzzFeed, Visual Verse and The Myriad. In her spare time, Bri enjoys painting, stargazing, night driving and collecting decks of tarot cards.
Charlene Modeste
Charlene is an actress with a talent for singing and songwriting. Her most recent work as a narrator for the film, Riotsville, USA made its world premiere at Sundance 2022. She is also a plant medicine advocate launching a new podcast called, It's A Surprise! that is focused on healing with cannabis.
Katie Shanks
Katie Shanks is a Los Angeles based fiber artist. They received their BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University Long Beach in 2010. Over the years, however, they have enriched their practice taking scenic byways through millinery, fashion, installation, and performance—embracing the multifaceted nature of the work and always pursuing new mediums to best communicate feeling and convey meaning.
Leah Zeiger
Leah Zeiger is a choreographer, dancer, and activist based in Los Angeles. As a survivor of a teenage abusive relationship, Leah's work is largely derived from her lived experience as well as embodied research in the survivor community. Leah’s methodology - Body Memory - invokes somatic principles, improvisational scores, and body-based research to explore the ways in which our bodies hold memory and how those memories shape our life experience. In 2015 she founded The Sunflower Project, an organization that uses dance to educate young people on abusive relationships, which was launched by the premiere of the documentary “Untold” that tells the harrowing story of Leah’s abuse. Leah has her Bachelor’s in Dance, summa cum laude, from Columbia College Chicago. She has worked for the Joffrey Ballet, Red Clay Dance, Lucky Plush Productions, Joel Hall Dancers & Center, danceCREATE, and more. She was recently a simultaneous artist-in-residence at Volta Performing Arts and Awakenings Art, which involved a year-long inquiry into the question “how do survivors move?” and resulted in the premiere of her first evening length original work “Once It All Ends”. In 2021 she was nominated as a contestant for the Women’s Center for Creative Work’s LA FEMINIST ICONS. This year, Leah will be choreographing a new original evening-length work exploring what lives in our spines.
Maya Mackrandilal
Maya Mackrandilal is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Los Angeles, a mixed-race woman of color with global roots. She received her BA in Studio Art with High Distinction from the University of Virginia and MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. Her work has been shown across the US and her writing has appeared in a variety of print and online publications.
Ruoyi Shi
Ruoyi Shi is an interdisciplinary artist who aims to experiment with the boundaries between nature and artificial existences, truth and truth-making. . Inspired by folklore, oral history, mythology, and personal memory, she combines humor and fiction to construct her own poetic narratives. Through her practice, Ruoyi plays a world-building game with the figures and creatures she invents. She also invites audiences to participate in her alternative reality.
Shima Taj Bakhsh
Shima Taj Bakhsh is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist currently residing in Long Beach. Much of her work is concerned with questioning the material conditions of bodies and borders. She engages with a variety of media to create architecture fragments that embody nonlinear narratives shifting from generation to generation. The time-based, sculptural configurations in her work represent a constant liminal state wherein cultural and social edges rub up against each other, encounter other timelines, and bridge histories.
Bridgette Yang
Bridgette Yang is a Taiwanese American poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker from Los Angeles. She has performed poetry at The Getty Center alongside John Legend, the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, USC’s Festival of Books, and at various high schools in California. Intertwining language with media production, she's worked with organizations such as GetLit Words Ignite and Youth Speaks to educate and inspire through the arts.
Chiho Harazaki
Her artwork has been exhibited individually and collectively, including at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Art Share L.A, and the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego. Chiho has also been commissioned to create large-scale installations for the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Los Angeles, the City of Santa Clarita, as well as for commercial clients like John Lobb.
Jireh Deng
Jireh Deng 鄧以樂 (she/they) is a Taiwanese-Hong Konger American born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley. Their creative work appears with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Human Rights Campaign, and more. In summer 2021 they interned at the Los Angeles Times and are currently an intern at NPR. You can follow their work on Instagram and Twitter at @jireh_deng.
Kell Scates
KELLI SCATES IS A PHOTOGRAPHER/CREATIVE DIRECTOR FROM INGLEWOOD, CA. HER STYLE SPANS DOCUMENTARY, FASHION, MUSIC AND ENTERTAINMENT - FROM FASHION SHOOTS IN SOUTH AFRICA, TO R&B MUSIC VIDEOS, TO EXHIBITION WORK EXPLORING THE TRAUMA OF BLACK GIRLHOOD. HER WORK IS OFTEN DESCRIBED AS COLORFUL, RHYTHMIC, AND DELIBERATE. KELLI DRAWS INSPIRATION FROM DREAMS, FILM, R&B MUSIC, HER GRANDMOTHERS SENSE OF STYLE, CULTURE, SPIRIT AND TRAVEL. SHE HAS BEEN PUBLISHED/FEATURED BY BLACK ENTERPRISE MAGAZINE, HANNAH MAGAZINE, HIP HOP DX, 21 NINETY, PULSE FILMS AND MORE. COMMITTED TO HIGHLIGHTING BLACK CULTURE, ESPECIALLY BLACK WOMEN, KELLI RE-IMAGINES COMMERCIAL, EDITORIAL, AND EXHIBITION WORK THAT EDIFIES US, FOR US AND BY US.
Melinda James
Melinda James is a Black and Thai cinematographer whose work encompasses documentaries, narratives, installations, commercials, music videos and NFTs. As a kid growing up in Yuba City, California, she enjoyed looking through toy viewfinders; it wasn't until much later that she realized cinematography is not just about looking, but about building points of connection. Centering her work on women, QTBIPOC, and underrepresented communities, Melinda is drawn to the process of unearthing the nuances of people’s everyday lives. She believes a good image is the starting point for communication, but it’s in the space between images where dialogue happens.
Rebekah Mei
Rebekah (she/her) explores the inner and outer worlds of bodies through the lens of matriarchal narratives. Her work consists of a mix of found object, printmaking, textile, and installation artwork. She is also one of the Collective Organizers for the Level Ground Artist Collective. She spends her time listening to what artists require and desire, then practices the magical arts of emails and errands to make those things happen.
Arezoo Bharthania
Arezoo Bharthania is an interdisciplinary Los Angeles based artist. She earned her MFA from CSU Long Beach and her MA from CSU Northridge. She has been showing her works across the US and internationally. Examples: Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, Sweden, 2022/ Archive Machines, Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, 2020 / Here We Are, We Are Here, Durden and Ray collective, 2020 / QIPO Fair 2, International contemporary art event organized by members of the QIPO curatorial collective in partnership with Reurbano, Mexico City, 2020 / Mine and Yours, Curated by Renae Bernard, Virtual Exhibition, 2020 /Petri Dishes, Curate by Kim Abeles/ Senses, site-specific Installation, Long Beach/ Brand 45, curated by Leslie Jones, Brand Library / Ivanka Loves Refugees, along with Lara Salmon’s performance curated by HK Zamani, PØST Gallery / Best of Possible Worlds, curated by Kio Griffith, Japan, and many more. Galleries: Durden and Ray
Cedric Tai
I am an un-disciplinary artist and neurodivergent educator who thinks through sculpture, talking, writing, performance and experimental exhibitions. A friend called me 'Pathologically Curious’, which is the most tender way I’ve ever heard my ADHD (aka Time-Blindness, aka Intention Deficit Disorder, aka Interest-Based Neurotype) described back to me. Some of my work is setup systematically (coding / spreadsheets / workshops / repetition) so that I can focus on the lively way that I want to elicit a response from a specific audience. Other works are like love letters, or are intentionally not efficient, wherein I come to know someone/something through immersing myself in an intimate process. Often the work ultimately reveals something about neurodivergent experience, labor and politics. Born in Detroit, residing in LA, with an art teaching certification from Michigan State University and MFA From the Glasgow School of Art. Awards: 2009 Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Visual Arts, a 2015 Knight Foundation Challenge Grant, a 2016 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and The Brutus Fund. Solo Exhibitions: "Concept Structure Torture Survival Title", New City Space, Glasgow (2011), "Indirectly Yours", Intermedia, CCA, Glasgow (2013), "We Need More ________!", Re:View Contemporary (2014), "Amateur Strategies", UCLA (2016), “50 Bad Artworks”, Casa Lü, Mexico City (2020).
Coffee Kang
Kang holds a BA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong (2016), and an MFA in Photo and Media from California Institute of the Arts (2018). Kang's works have been showcased internationally in Vienna, Leipzig, Budapest, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and in Los Angeles at Launch LA, The Box, Last Projects, MAK center, Nomad Pavilion, and Spring/Break Art Show. Kang was an artist in residence at Pilotenkueche and Eastside International in 2019, and at Level Ground in 2020.
Kamaria Shepherd
Kamaria Shepherd (b. 1991 in Houston, Texas, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work explores themes of race, womanhood, and femininity, as an African American woman. She works within poetry, painting, printmaking, and installation. Her work has been featured on episodes of The L Word GQ. Kamaria has exhibited at Bermudez Projects, Ochi Projects, Millard Sheets Art Center, and Human Resources in California; Chen’s and New Release Gallery in New York City; and WIRWIR gallery in Berlin, Germany. She earned an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from UCLA in 2018 and a B.F.A. in Painting concentrating in Literary Arts from RISD in 2015. Kamaria is the 2018 UCLA recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. She attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Frans Masereel Centrum, and was a Visiting Researcher at CAD+SR in Spoleto, Italy.
Labkhand Olfatmanesh
Labkhand Olfatmanesh born in Tehran, Iran, and Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist and curator examining themes of feminism, race, isolation, and borders in underrepresented communities. She blends fictionalized narratives with documentary techniques, portraiture, and social practice to explore intimacy, humor, psychology, and transitory states that bridge one identity with another and how these forces take shape in the United States and her birthplace of Iran. Labkhand has been exhibited across the US and internationally, including; Photo London U.K.; Rencontres d’Arles, France; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; Helm Bakery District in collaboration with the Culver City Arts Foundation; the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco ; Jamaica Center of Art & Learning, NY ;CICA Museum, South Korea ; 2020 Feminist Border Arts Film Festival, NMSU ;4Culture, Seattle, WA ; The Glass Box Gallery at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Artist in residence in Side Street project based on Pasadena and 2021 Active Innovator Leadership program at Arts for LA. She was also awarded the LensCulture Portrait Awards Jurors’ Pick and received first place at the Los Angeles Center of Photography’s second annual fine art photo competition; second place Craft Contemporary art Museum (Focus Iran 3); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, NYC. Her work has also been featured by the United Nations, the British Council, and Australian High Commission and in the UNESCO Palace, Lebanon. She is currently a board member at Level Ground organization; Artist in residence in 18th street arts center and teaching artist at Project Art based on NYC and Grant panelist at Los Angeles Art and Culture.
Meredith Adelaide
Photography, film, and music via aarm, minimal, patient self-inquiry, illuminating the too-often neglected grief, fragmentation and psychic-bruising of being a closed-off human consciousness trying to connect in the modern world. The way out is through through. Meredith Adelaide invites us to go inward and embrace our shadows, affirming that when we do, the truth is always worth taking a look at-- and even worth sharing.
Samantha Curley
Samantha Curley is a film producer and creative entrepreneur who helped start Level Ground in 2013. Together with Chase Joynt, she now runs Level Ground Productions which premiered its first film at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. In her free time, she plays on a women's recreational basketball team and is a community organizer in Echo Park.
Tara Patrice
Tara Patrice is painter based in Los Angeles, California. Tara’s artwork has be shown in exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. Her work focuses on combination of styles and subjects, drawing inspiration from her culture and beliefs. Her subject matter usually centers on representation for people color, specifically women. Tara not only works to show diversity through her art, but also explores the world around us, reflecting her ideas of the earth and climate.