Amanda Leigh EvansDuring the SOUTHS Symposium, Amanda Evans contributed to the even through an artist choreographed dinner.

Amanda Leigh Evans (she or they) is an artist, educator and cultivator seeking social and ecological interdependence. Her work manifests as research-driven ceramic objects, performance, print and digital media, public art, and long-term collaborative systems.

Proudly a first-gen college student from a blue and pink-collar working class family, Evans spent her childhood doing homework in the breakrooms of beauty salons and climbing on 2x4 frames at construction sites in California’s Inland Empire and rural Nevada County.

Evans’ work oscillates between work for art spaces and multi-year, site-specific projects by-with-for the communities she inhabits. For five years (2016-21), Evans was an artist-in-residence in a large affordable housing complex in East Portland, OR, where she and her neighbors co-created The Living School of Art, an intergenerational alternative art school that centered the creative practices of their multilingual, multigenerational community. For eight years (2014-2022), Evans was a core collaborator at KSMoCA, a contemporary art museum inside a K-5 public elementary school in Portland, OR. Since 2021, Evans and her collaborator Tia Kramer (together known as DeepTime Collective) have been developing When The River Becomes a Cloud, a coauthored contemporary public artwork generated with students at a PreK-12th grade public school in rural Eastern WA. DeepTime Collective were recently one-year artists-in-residence at the Everson Museum (2023-24), presenting a day-long event and solo exhibition titled, A Day Without A Clock.

Additionally, Evans has coauthored several multi-year projects engaging the history, politics and ecology of the Los Angeles River through LA Urban Rangers (2011-13) and Play the LA River (2013-15).

Evans holds an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a Post-Bacc in Ceramics from Cal State Long Beach. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.


Curry J. Hackett During the SOUTHS Symposium, Curry J. Hackett was the afterpary DJ.
Curry J. Hackett is a transdisciplinary designer, visual artist, and educator exploring Black relationships to land, media, and memory. A Farmville, Virginia native, his work works across scales and mediums to speculate on the aesthetics and ecologies of the American South.

Hackett’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Metropolis, among others. He has exhibited at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, the Architectural Association School of Architecture, and the “Making Home”—Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Curry holds architecture degrees from Howard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and currently serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Jasmine Smith