Curatorial Board

ACRE's Curatorial Board is made up of the ACRE Projects' team of Directors and the current class of Curatorial Fellows. 

ACRE’s Curatorial Fellows are talented emerging arts organizers, independent curators, and writers who visit the residency each session during the summer to meet residents, hold studio visits, and participate in programming. In the year following the residency, ACRE's Curatorial Fellows provide resources, organize group exhibitions, and facilitate public programming in collaboration with ACRE residents. 

ACRE Projects Directors:

Exhibitions Director - Lauren Leving

Lauren Leving is a curator and writer based in Chicago, IL. Her work explores how creative practice can expand institutionally-rooted understandings of access. Currently, she is ACRE’s Exhibitions Director and Curator-at-Large at the Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) Cleveland. In 2023, she co-curated Everlasting Plastics, which was originally presented in the U.S. Pavilion during the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale and traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA. Previously, Leving was Exhibitions Manager for Wrightwood 659 and has held curatorial fellowships at Hyde Park Art Center and ACRE projects. She has organized exhibitions at spaces including Material Exhibitions, Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Leving holds an MA in Museum & Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois–Chicago and a BA from Tulane University.

Exhibitions Intern - Mattea Sklut

Mattea Sklut is an undergraduate student at Loyola University Chicago, where she is pursuing a dual bachelor's degree in Art History and History with minors in Visual Communications and European Studies. She is currently the exhibitions intern at ACRE Projects, an archivist with the Rabbi Byron Sherwin Foundation, and works at Loyola’s Literacy Center supporting ESL members of the Rogers Park community.

ACRE 2020-2021 Curatorial Fellows:

Rohan Ayinde

Rohan Ayinde is a Chicago based artist, writer and curator. His interdisciplinary work is centered around creating "otherwise" potentials (Ashon Crawley), and in so doing breaking down and simultaneously reconfiguring the ideological architectures that shape our daily and generational lives. Most often the landscapes he explores are rooted in questions about quantum physics, black radical aesthetics and architecture. 

Max Guy

Max Guy is a Chicago-based artist working in performance, collage, sculpture and installation. His work very clumsily gives form to existential crises, moral and ethical dilemma. Guy has exhibited work at Prairie, The Back Room, and Bar 4000, Chicago; Moonmist, Houston; 321 Gallery, New York; What Pipeline, Detroit; Federico Vavassori, Milan; Nudashank and Franklin Street, Baltimore; and has performed at Signal and Canada Gallery in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Sector 2337, and Comfort Station. Max currently works as Manager of Institutional Giving at Hyde Park Art Center.

Sarita Hernández

Sarita Hernández is a Chicago based arts educator, oral hxstorian, and print/zinemaker from Califas. Sarita is co-founder of marimacha monarca press, a queer and trans* people of color zine familia based in Chicago’s South Side. Sarita has been a teaching artist and curatorial fellow for the UIC Latino Cultural Center, Art Institute of Chicago, and National Museum of Mexican Art. Hernández is interested in artist interventions of the historical archive, reimagining social documentation, and activation of everyday hxstories.

Lindsay Hutchens

Lindsay Hutchens makes photographic art, writes about vernacular family photographs, sometimes gets to do research and write wall labels at the MCA Chicago, and curates exhibitions in her apartment gallery, Gallery Kin. A Chicago transplant from Texas, Lindsay holds an MA in Visual Critical Studies and an MFA in Photography, both from SAIC.

Stephanie Koch

Stephanie Koch is interested in the links between nation and narration. Her multidisciplinary projects adopt editorial histories and processes to shift the authorial voice from the nation to those on the periphery.  Koch is currently a 2019-2020 Hatch Projects Curator at Chicago Artists Coalition and is Co-Founder and Co-Director of Annas, a residential studio and gallery. 

Rachel McDermott

Rachel McDermott is an arts administrator and curator based in Chicago. She works with artists who question our understandings of the vernacular everyday to shift how we move through social, ecological, and digital spaces. McDermott has previously worked on curatorial and marketing teams at ASMP Chicago/Midwest, Galley 400, EXPO CHICAGO, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Robert F DeCaprio Art Gallery.

Gee Wesley

Gee Wesley is an arts organizer born in Monrovia, Liberia, and based in New York. Wesley has held previous roles as Program Director at Recess, Curatorial Fellow at SculptureCenter, Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and adjunct faculty in the Curatorial Practice MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Wesley is a founder and co-director of Ulises, a bookshop and curatorial platform based in Philadelphia. Wesley’s work addresses the relationship between publics and publications and the role of small-scale and independent art initiatives in incubating new modes of curatorial and artistic practice. Wesley is an M.A. candidate at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

ACRE 2019-2020 Curatorial Fellows:

Elizabeth Lalley

Elizabeth Lalley is a Chicago-based writer, independent curator, and the assistant director of Goldfinch Projects. She received an MA in Museum & Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois-Chicago, and holds a BA from the University of Michigan where she received the Academy of American Poets Award. Elizabeth has worked for the Chicago Artists Coalition, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage, and the University of Michigan Department of English. She is also a contributor to Newcity and Chicago Artist Writers.

Lauren Leving

Lauren Leving is a Chicago-based writer and curator. She graduated with a BA from Tulane University and recently received her MA in Museum & Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has worked as the Curatorial Fellow for Hyde Park Art Center, at 6018North, and in commercial galleries in both Chicago and New Orleans. Her research and curation investigate the intersections of contemporary exhibition practices, pedagogy, and social justice. 

Stephanie Koch

Stephanie Koch is interested in the links between nation and narration. Her multidisciplinary projects adopt editorial histories and processes to shift the authorial voice from the nation to those on the periphery. By questioning who may assume a position of authority to (re)write a person or nation into being, she aims to not only assert one’s individual agency, but pose new imaginings of national affiliation and action.  She received a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago and recently received a MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, she is a Curatorial Fellow with ACRE and Co-Founder and Co-Director of Annas, a residential studio and gallery. 

Lucy Stranger

Lucy Stranger is a curator and writer from Australia, who is currently working in Chicago. Growing up in a rural area, she is particularly interested in experimental art spaces that move between major metropolitan spaces and rural areas. Last year whilst completing a Master of Curating, she was a curatorial intern at the Biennale of Sydney, working under Artistic Director Mami Kataoka. She also co-curated ‘Artist Profile: Australasian Painters 2007‐2017’ at Orange Regional Gallery, a major survey exhibition that engaged with expansive painters from Australia and the Pacific Region. Over the last two years she was Assistant Curator for ‘It’s Our Thing’ at Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney, which was a two-year community engagement project that examined the Hip‐Hop scene during the 1980s in Blacktown and the influence of Hip-Hop today. Her work is underscored by the aim of bringing the periphery to the centre.

Max Guy

Max Guy is a Chicago-based artist working in performance, collage, sculpture and installation. His work very clumsily gives form to existential crises, moral and ethical dilemma. He has a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and an MFA from the Department of Art, Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. Max was recently a Jackman Goldwasser artist in residence at Hyde Park Art Center. Max has exhibited work at Prairie, The Back Room, and Bar 4000, Chicago; Moonmist, Houston; 321 Gallery, New York; What Pipeline, Detroit; Federico Vavassori, Milan; Nudashank and Franklin Street, Baltimore; he has performed at Signal and Canada Gallery in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Sector 2337, and Comfort Station. Max currently works as Manager of Institutional Giving at Hyde Park Art Center.

Adia Sykes

Adia Sykes is a Chicago-based curator and arts administrator. She graduated in 2018 from  the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with a Masters of Arts from the Department of Arts Administration and Policy and has a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2016) with a focus on material culture and museums. Her current research interests include examining the history and potential of curatorial practice as an advocacy tool for racial equity in the arts and racial and gendered identities explored in the visual and performative practices of emerging artists. Her Masters thesis focused on formations of self-organized networks of support that exist to sustain the practices of historically marginalized artist communities and maps this contemporary ecosystem of support. Her curatorial work has been exhibited at The Sullivan Galleries, Woman Made Gallery, the Chicago Mayor’s Office, and ACRE Projects.