2025 Jurors

Tyler Blackwell (he/him) is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, a position he has held since 2022. Specializing in queer and historically underrepresented artist practices, post-1960s abstract painting and sculpture, and postcolonial strategies in video and photography, he has worked in both university and encyclopedic art museums.  

For the Speed, Blackwell has initiated a new focus exhibition series called “Current Speed,” which focuses on emerging and mid-career artists. The first iterations of this series center on Sky Hopinka (2022), Angel Otero/Leslie Martinez (2023), and Kathia St. Hilaire (2024, co-organized with the Clark Art Institute), and Vian Sora (2025, co-organized with Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Asia Society Texas). He is also currently at work on the first major museum survey devoted to the interdisciplinary practice of artist Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians). He is leading the effort to build and significantly broaden the Speed Art Museum’s contemporary collection and to rethink its contemporary art displays.

For the museum, Blackwell has been thrilled to acquire works by a range of international artists, including Igshaan Adams, Rita Ackermann, Anthony Akinbola, Teresa Baker, Hernan Bas, María Berrío, Jordan Ann Craig, Tony Cokes, Anthony Cudahy, vanessa german, Hugh Hayden, Oliver Herring, Esteban Jefferson, Young Joon Kwak, Simone Leigh, Leslie Martinez, Danielle Mckinney, Rebecca Morris, Angel Otero, Naudline Pierre, Ebony G. Patterson, Christina Quarles, Celeste Rapone, Jacolby Satterwhite, Kathia St. Hilaire, Chiffon Thomas, Salman Toor, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, and Jimmy Wright, among others.  

Previously, from 2018-2022, he was the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum, a leading contemporary art institute on the campus of the University of Houston. During his tenure at the Blaffer, Blackwell worked in close collaboration with the museum’s director to rethink and expand the institution’s diverse and multidisciplinary program of artist-centric exhibitions, publications, public programs, and community engagement. For that museum, he organized or co-organized solo exhibitions with a range of emerging and established international artists, including many artists’ first museum presentations in the United States. These included major exhibitions of Monira Al Qadiri, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Rodney McMillian, and Rebecca Morris, as well as focus shows of Leslie Martinez, Jacolby Satterwhite, Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Jagdeep Raina, Jacqueline Nova, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Yoshua Okón.

In 2021, Blackwell co-curated the group exhibition Carriers: The Body as a Site of Danger and Desire, which featured the work of fifteen Houston-area artists addressing issues of identity, community health, and social inequality. He also curated and expanded the Houston presentations of the 2019 traveling survey exhibition of the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya (organized by CAM St. Louis) and the 2021 traveling survey exhibition of artist Hugh Hayden (organized by ICA Miami).  

Prior to 2018, Blackwell held positions at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, where he supported permanent collection acquisitions and the organization of wide-ranging exhibitions, commissions, programs, and performances. His writing has been published in exhibition catalogues for the Blaffer, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art, and the Centre for Fine Arts Brussels. Blackwell holds a MA from the University of Chicago.

Suzanne Ramljak is Vice President of Collections
& Curatorial Affairs at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. She was formerly Curator at the American Federation of Arts, New York, where she curated the currently touring exhibition, Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld. Ramljak previously served as Editor of Sculpture magazine and of Metalsmith and Glass Quarterly magazines. Among the books and exhibition catalogues she has authored are Natural Wonders: The Sublime in Contemporary Art; On Body and Soul: Contemporary Armor to Amulets; and Loaded: Guns in Contemporary Art.

Bryn Jackson is an artist, curator, and cultural advisor based in Indianapolis whose practice — grounded in ecological justice and institutional accountability — positions nature as a medium to confront complex histories and foster connectivity. As an interdisciplinary artist, he unites sculpture, photography, time-based media, arts administration, community engagement, and habitat design to produce works that promote environmental restoration and collective healing.

Bryn received a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is nationally recognized and has been supported by the Arts Council of Indianapolis, Lilly Endowment Inc., Central Indiana Community Foundation, Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation, Herbert Simon Family Foundation, Arts Midwest, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Bryn is a 2023 recipient of a Power Plant Grant, awarded by Big Car Collaborative and funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Regional Regranting Program. He was an inaugural member of The Association of Art Museum Curators’ Professional Alliance for Curators of Color. He is an Artist & Public Life Resident with Big Car Collaborative, a Community Ambassador for Indiana Repertory Theatre, and a member of the Artists at Work 2025-26 cohort. Bryn currently serves on the Board of Directors and as Chair of the Collections Council for the Eiteljorg Museum and on the Board of Directors for Step-Up Inc.

NIKHIL MELNECHUK is a filmmaker and co-founder of Mystic Entertainment, whose work has spanned the independent film landscape. His Nashville music feature production THE EASY KIND releases in theaters later this year, and his critically acclaimed New York spoken word documentary DON’T BE NICE is available on FUSE+ and Prime Video. Most recently, Melnechuk directed the Texas woman bull riding film DAISY due out next year, and co-directed the music video for Morgan’s Wade’s “Hardwood Floor,” streaming now. Melnechuk formerly ran New York City’s storied poetry venue, the Bowery Poetry Club, and is a Satellite Collective art fellow. 

Wired from a very young age with an unusually comprehensive and in-tune knowledge and understanding of all things technology, AJ leads LiveSpace with a profound eagerness to push boundaries and explore the edge of what is possible for live events.

Born and raised in Detroit, Melinda Me/Me is an installation designer, and event producer for Studio M Detroit. Studio M Detroit is a boutique event design and production studio, that creates bold and courageous event experiences for 2 to 20,000 Her work embodies the intersection of architecture, design, and joy. She explores and exploits ephemeral design through custom large-scale installations and convenings. Upon obtaining a degree in architecture, she has travelled extensively and has lived in Berlin and Palermo.  Most recently, she has created a platform called Electric Fruit which is a platform for black  and brown artists and designers to gain more exposure for their work. With a significant investment by the Knight Foundation, she has officially launch Electric Fruit in 2023.  She has produced hundreds of events during her career and always goes the extra mile to ensure the success of the event for all.