VALIE EXPORT: Embodied

Jia Yi Gu is a curator, researcher and designer working at the intersections of art and architecture. Since 2021, she is Director and Curator at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. From 2014-2020, she served as director of Materials & Applications, a Los Angeles based project space for experimental architecture. In 2016, she co-founded the architecture design studio Spinagu, an architecture design office based in Los Angeles that works on buildings, environments, exhibition design, and furniture. Her scholarly work focuses on histories of knowledge production and display practices in art and architecture. Over the past decade, she has developed a pedagogical and curatorial practice centering on research-based exhibitions.

Chloë Flores is a Latinx Yaqui Native curator and arts writer, editor, advisor, and producer whose work centers on body-based, performative, and site-specific practices and the production of culture in public space. She is the Executive and Artistic Director of homeLA, a LA-based performance organization and platform for experimental and site-specific dance, performance, and art. Flores founded and directed GuestHaus Residency (2011-2023), was Programs Director at Heidi Duckler Dance (2021-22), and co-founded the Los Angeles Dance Worker Coalition (LADWC) that developed/launched the first dance-specific grant program for the Los Angeles’ DCA Performing Arts Division (2022).

Alissa Walker is a writer based in Los Angeles covering transportation, housing, urban design, public space, and environmental policy. She is the 2021 recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary for her writing on design and urbanism, and played herself on the traffic safety episode of Adam Conover’s show Adam Ruins Everything, “Adam Ruins a Murder.” Alissa lives in LA’s Historic Filipinotown neighborhood, where she is the co-host of LA Podcast, an avid ice cream consumer, and a mom to the city’s two most enthusiastic public transit riders.