The InLiquid Art Advisory Committee is Here to Help

Art Advisory Committee | as of September 2024

Debora Charmelus

BIO

Debora Charmelus is an east-coast based Haitian-American and multi-hyphenated creative. From event planning to digital strategy, her work is rooted in helping local businesses succeed, cultivating community for national brands, and showcasing creatives through experiential production.

An adaptable connector, creator, and storyteller, Deb uses her multitudinous skills to advocate for marginalized voices and thread together art and grassroots movements via placemaking, programming, trainings, and product creation. A jill of all trades, Debora specializes in assisting national and local small businesses with a focus in hospitality, food, retail, and fine art by using their values to empower their narrative. A problem solver by nature, Debora thrives by creating communities built with all people in mind.

Matt Curtius

BIO

Matt Curtius is an artist, illustrator and educator whose creative practice is a collaborative endeavor with his partner, Gina Triplett. The studio’s fine art has been exhibited widely, including at The National Museum of China, The Delaware Art Museum, The Woodmere Art Museum, and galleries in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Their paintings are an artifact of their dialogue in the studio, working out ideas as they pass canvasses back and forth, reacting to each other’s contributions. These discussions have varied over time, but often return to themes of art historical comparisons, connections between the natural and synthetic worlds, and the specific dynamic of two people coming together within a piece of singular artistic output.

When they take on illustration projects, their partners most often take their cues from the couple’s independent work, with themes using natural subjects in both literal and symbolic manners. These illustrations have graced everything from snowboards to murals, and from children’s books to housewares. This work has seen them collaborating with clients that have included: Whole Foods, Macys, Urban Outfitters, Comcast, Scholastic, Knopf, MIT Press, The New York Times and many others. This work has been chronicled in several books on illustration, including Drawn to Type: Lettering for Illustrators by Marty Blake and 50 Years of Illustration by Laurence Zeegan and Caroline Roberts.

Matt is an Associate Professor at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.

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Dejay Duckett

BIO

Dejay B. Duckett is the Director of Curatorial Services at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Over the last four years at AAMP she has organized 11 exhibitions including Collective Conscious and Sonya Clark: Self Evident. Formerly, she was Associate Curator at The University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Ross Gallery where for 15 years she curated projects including Henrique Oliverira: Adencalcinoma Poliresidual and Darkwater Revival: After Terry Adkins. Duckett earned her B.A. in Art History from Spelman College in 1994, and an M.A. in Museum Studies from Seton Hall University in 2001, where she researched the evolving role of the culturally specific museum in the 21st Century. In 2019, Duckett was awarded the Distinguished Alumna Award from the College of Communication and Arts at Seton Hall University.

Nora Elmarzouky

BIO

Currently working as a Climate Justice organizer with POWER in Philadelphia working on statewide policies, coalitions, and base-building, prior to which I was a Climate Fellow. I co-founded the Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary Journal, the first Arabic newspaper in Philadelphia in 100 years, a continuation of the Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary Project that I managed and facilitated collaboration. I am part of in.site collaborative, a collective of seven other women who through our various work seek to address issues of unequal urban development. I am also a cultural organizer working on projects at the intersection of arts, culture, community development, and energy democracy, especially focusing on community engagement, political education, and program design and evaluation. Prior, I worked in democracy activism and designed experiential learning programs in Egypt. I am on the board of YallaPunk, Barrio Alegria, East Parkside Residents Association and was a community advisor for Philadelphia Contemporary's Commonwealth project. Growing up and working between Egypt and the US has offered me insights into a multitude of cultures - similarities, parallels, differences - which has largely influenced my work.

Albert Fung

BIO

Albert Fung is a Philadelphia-based painter and printmaker. He navigates the mysteries of the rectangle, creating visionary spaces. He has shown at several local galleries including City Arts Salon, Arch Enemy Arts, Boston Street Gallery Roger LaPelle Galleries, and LG Tripp Gallery. He has taught painting and printmaking at Tyler School of Art, University of the Arts, Moore College of Art, Arcadia University, Drexel University, Fleisher Art Memorial, Cheltenham Center for the Arts, and Allens Lane Art Center. He has a BFA in Printmaking from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Massachusetts College of Art. His newest project is Philly Crit in which he works as an administrator and a graphic designer. Philly Crit brings artists together from around the Philadelphia area to have meaningful dialogues about their work.

Tu Huynh

BIO

Tu Huynh has 30 years of professional experience in the arts, including the last 20 as the person behind Philadelphia’s Art In City Hall program. He has organized over 300 exhibitions and countless cultural events in the “People’s Building”, transforming nontraditional public spaces into a platform for the arts by providing opportunities, voice, and representation in the most important civic building in Philadelphia. He sees himself as a facilitator and cultural organizer, and his curatorial approach has largely been collaborative, community-minded, and community-driven. The platform has celebrated Philadelphia’s hopes and aspirations, but also numerous contemporary issues, such as gun violence, restorative justice, voting, women’s rights, and the many expressions of Philadelphia’s underserved communities. Beyond City Hall, he recently curated the permanent exhibit at PHL Airport honoring the legacy of the late Reverend Dr. Leon H. Sullivan at International Arrivals Hall and “Remembering MOVE: May 13, 1985”, the tragic history of the bombing on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia.

Tu was born in Da Nang, Vietnam and as a child, escaped with his family to America during the Fall of Saigon in 1975. He grew up in Miami and graduated from the University of Florida. He has been affiliated with various galleries throughout Florida and the Washington D.C. area, and a member of the International Artist Support Group, Vietnamese Artists in Exile project, and a contributor for art events at the Vietnamese Embassy. He has been a writer for an online Vietnamese literary magazine and has served on various advisory boards over the years. His professional experience includes working as an exhibiting and commercial artist, muralist, faux finisher, a contractor to the National Gallery of Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, and an Assistant Curator/Exhibits Assistant at the African American Museum in Philadelphia before joining the City of Philadelphia.

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Thora Jacobson

BIO

Thora has actively participated in the Philadelphia art community, holding vital roles at several non-profit arts organizations since 1970. She served as CEO of the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the Fleisher Art Memorial, where she created the Challenge Exhibitions (now known as the Wind Challenge) and Fleisher’s Community Partnerships in the Arts program. She also served as the COO at both Philagrafika 2010 and Mural Arts Philadelphia, where she later served as Director of Design Review and managed the development of MAP’s history, Mural Arts at 30. As an independent curator, Thora has organized several materials-based exhibitions in local galleries and created a strategic plan for the Asian Arts Initiative. She also conducted an element of a research project for the Social Impact of the Arts Project at Penn’s School of Social Policy and Practice.Thora is currently a visual arts management consultant focusing on systems development and program design.

Leslie Kaufman

BIO

Leslie Kaufman is the founder and president of Philadelphia Sculptors, the Philadelphia based organization of professional sculptors. As its president she has organized and/or curated over 70 exhibitions, annual programs and a regional sculpture conference. Highlights include Global Warming at the Icebox, a 2008 exhibition of environmentally themed sculptures and installations; Catagenesis, a 2012 exhibition of site specific installations at a former textile dyeing factory; Artship Olympia, a 2016 exhibition of site specific installations on Cruiser Olympia at Philadelphia’s Penn’s Landing; and FLOW, a 2019 exhibition of floating sculptures in the boat basin at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. Kaufman has organized public art projects, including A Case for Art, in 2005 where themed sculptures were sited in different locations throughout Philadelphia and was the Art Director for the 2014 ArtPlace America Destination Frankford project. Kaufman originated the Burlington County College Sculpture Garden, in Pemberton, NJ where she organized annual sculpture competitions from 1988 – 2008 on the college grounds. She was an adjunct professor of art at Burlington County College and at The College of New Jersey. Her professional writing includes articles and art reviews published in Sculpture and Inside Magazine and she has written and received grants for both Philadelphia Sculptors and the BCC Sculpture Garden. She is a practicing sculptor and has a long exhibition history. In addition to her art pursuits, she serves on the boards of the Havre de Grace Maritime Museum and the Friends of Orkney Park and has also just published a children’s book, Gracie: The Tale of a Very Special Sea Monster. Leslie received her MFA from Vermont College in the Visual Arts, her M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her BA in English from Colgate University, from which she graduated cum laude.

Angela McQuillan

BIO

Angela McQuillan is a Philadelphia-based artist and curator working at the intersection of art and science. Angela has a B.S. in Biology from the University of Texas at Austin, a B.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from Temple University, and a M.P.S. in Business for Art and Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is a former member of the Little Berlin and Grizzly Grizzly artist collectives in Philadelphia. Angela has curated over 50 art exhibitions relating to science and technology. Angela worked as the curator at the Esther Klein Gallery for 9 years from 2014 - 2021, and co-founded the University City Science Center’s BioArt Residency in 2017 at the biotechnology company Integral Molecular. This residency program recently won the 2019 Art + Business Partnership Award by the Philadelphia Arts & Business Council. Angela opened Chimaera in 2022, a gallery in East Falls, Philadelphia. Her work has been featured in prominent publications such as The New York Times, Forbes and SciArt in America.

Jennifer-Navva Milliken

BIO

Jennifer-Navva Milliken is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museum for Art in Wood. Throughout her international career, she has curated exhibitions for museums, galleries, and unconventional spaces. In her current position, she has worked to enfold contemporary issues into the Museum’s wood-focused approach, while expanding awareness for the Museum, its unique mission, and its resources. Milliken remains in demand as a lecturer and writer due to her expertise in the intersecting fields of art, craft, and design.