ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.
On Wednesday, March 18th at 8pm, hodgepodge-ist and 2019 AIR Ying Liu invites ISSUE members and special guests to:
Check in with your body.
Check in with your mind.
Check in with ISSUE, the space—where we belong.
Check in with your community—the experimental arts community—where you are a member.
Check in with each other.
Check in is a tad interactive. We’ll spend some finite time together.
ISSUE Members can RSVP to this intimate event for free using their unique code at checkout.
Howie Chen is a New York–based curator and writer. Chen and Mika Tajima formed New Humans, a moniker for collaborations including performances and projects with Vito Acconci, Charles Atlas, Judith Butler, John Smith and C. Spencer Yeh, among others. Chen is also a member of Title TK ( with Cory Arcangel and Alan Licht) is a banter-prone band that has been described as ‘a cross between David Antin and Spinal Tap.’ He is the Director and Curator of 80WSE Gallery at NYU and writes the advice columns Hard Truths and Hard Choices with Andrew Lampert for Art in America magazine.
Sena Tajima Chen is a New York City–born student and dancer who began training at age two. She studied at Ballet Institute NY, the Joffrey Ballet School, and the School of American Ballet, and most recently performed in New York City Ballet’s Swan Lake. She currently attends Ballet Tech, New York.
Yi Chen was born and raised in the island country of Taiwan. She performed in Ying Liu's Don't Be Shy Man!—a hybrid show inspired by Stuart Sherman’s poetry, Now We Start from the Arm, HANG OUT along with its two prototypes, Playdate, and PIGTAIL—A Swivel Stool Dance™.
Seth Cohen lives and works in New York. His practice combines tropes of popular culture, vernacular forms, and art historical clichés to unearth and employ buried psychic forces. Individual works draw on references from film, literature, historical narratives, bodily functions, and religious iconography. Apart from his artistic practice, he has earned a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which has informed his work’s engagement with the embodied self.
keith 'chief ' connolly has worked internal PR/stage imaging for ying liu since 2014. as L. GRAY he is one third of the musical group GRAY/SMITH & SPEER, and has worked in various capacities for the no-neck blues band, new york city players, BOMB magazine &c.
John Matturri’s work wanders about within ill-defined regions standing between art, writing, and philosophy. His work has always been founded on a bottom-up process of taking relatively unstructured collections of images, including extensive archives of Venice, Paris, Berlin, and New York, and using discovered correspondences within them to create walls, pages, and screens covered with highly structured arrangements of images, often with found and written texts. He has benefitted by working with Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, John Zorn, Stuart Sherman, Michael Kirby, Ying Liu, and Shelley Hirsch. Along the way, he engaged in graduate work in Philosophy and Cinema Studies and for many years taught these subjects at Queens College.
Ernie Monteiro is a Brooklyn based artist. Her work focuses on ceramic sculptural pieces and illustrative work featuring whimsical imagery.
Andrew Lampert is an artist, archivist, writer and publisher. His work has been widely exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Getty Museum, New York Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. He has authored and edited more than twelve books, and is co-publisher (with Christine Burgin) and editor of the imprint The Further Reading Library. Lampert writes the advice columns Hard Truths and Hard Choices with Howie Chen for Art in America magazine. The former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, he has preserved hundreds of canonical experimental and independent films and videos. Teri Garr, a musical project with L. Gray, will debut in 2026.
Cecilia Lopez is a composer, improviser and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, based in New York. She works across the media of performance, installation and sound sculpture; often through the creation of electronic sound devices and systems. Her work has been performed and exhibited internationally at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Argentina), Center for Contemporary Arts (Vilnius, Lithuania), Ostrava Days Festival 2011 (Czech Republic), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo, Norway), the XIV Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador) and in the United States at MASS MoCA, The Guggenheim Museum, Experimental Intermedia, Fridman Gallery, Roulette Intermedium, Issue Project Room, Lincoln Center, among others. Grants and awards include a New York State Council for the Arts Individual project grant, the Media Arts Grant (MAAF) for Individual Artists from the New York State Council for the Arts in partnership with Wave Farm, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the Jerome Foundation and Roulette Intermedium Commission. She was a Civitella Ranieri fellow in 2015 and has participated in various international residency programs. Lopez holds an MFA in Music/Sound from The Milton Avery School of the Arts Bard College and an MA in composition from Wesleyan University. Collaborators include Carmen Baliero, John Driscoll, Carrie Schneider, Ingrid Laubrock and Zeena Parkins.
Jack Skaggs is an LA-based artist and actor whose work is collaborative, unorthodox and cool. His perspective is informed by a diverse heritage, including his Japanese great-grandmother. He started collaborating with Ying Liu in 2018, and has contributed to numerous shows, including Playdate and PIGTAIL presented by the ISSUE Project Room. Actively pursuing an acting career, he recently toured the west coast with his improv group Gusher and currently hosts and performs in three recurring monthly improv shows throughout LA. He also starred earlier this year in the sold-out play A Wholesome Meat and Potatoes American Romance at Hollywood’s Broadwater theater. On screen, he has appeared in studio productions such as The Pitt, The Morning Show, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood 2 and Grey’s Anatomy, sharing the screen with Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Noah Wyle and Amy Poehler.
Ying Liu is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist whose work hybridizes theater, dance, video, and performance art with DIY props and an exuberant sense of play by employing consumer technology—such as VR, GoPro and GPS—and featuring diverse, multi-generational performers. She debuted at the Emily Harvey Foundation in 2014 and has since received support from institutions like the Jerome Foundation, NYFA/NYSCA, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Institute for Public Architecture, the MAP Fund, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2019, as a resident at the ISSUE Project Room, she presented two commissioned works: Playdate, a neighborhood-wide play in and about Downtown Brooklyn, and PIGTAIL—A Swivel Stool Dance™.
