JUROR BIOS

Artwork Literature

Tia-Simone Gardner

Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, Black feminist scholar, and educator. Gardner, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham, and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. She has participated as Studio Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and held artists residencies at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York; IASPIS in Stockholm; and the Frank Mohr Institute of Art in the Netherlands. Gardner is currently completing her Ph.d. in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Martha Polk

Martha Polk is a nonfiction writer based in Atlanta, Georgia who writes most about film, television, gender politics, and her parents. Among other print and online outlets, her work has appeared in/ on The Hairpin, Bitch Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, Hippocampus Magazine, Feministing.com, the MUBI Notebook, and The Chattahoochee Review, where her essay “Eulogy for Nonsense” was the runnerup for the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a lifer at SPA and graduated in 2004 before going on to Carleton College where she majored in History and Cinema Studies.