President: Emma Lewis
Emma Lewis works for the nonprofit organization Le Korsa, an affiliated organization of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, leading their initiative to open an exhibition space and arts education center in rural Senegal. She practiced law for many years, was Executive Director of the Center for Italian Modern Art, and is a former trustee of the Albers Foundation, in which she remains active.
Treasurer: Paolo Sellan
Paolo is currently working as the VP of Finance and Accounting at Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and has worked for different not-for-profits over the past 20 years. Paolo is a hands-on, expert problem-solver and can explain complex issues in simple terms. In his free time he likes to hang out at Open Source, go fishing or bike long distances in and around NYC.
Secretary: Pim Zeegers
Pim Zeegers is the founder of Pim Philip and has been working as a certified guide and organizer of personal and business travel in New York for the past six years. He has worked with an impressive roster of guests and built a strong network of collaborators to assemble successful journeys. Before moving to New York in 2010, Pim lived in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Brussels, where he worked for several international companies. Urban interplay, trends and design have been resounding themes throughout his career.
Gertjan Meijer
Gertjan Meijer grew up in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Twelve years ago he and his partner came to New York City for a job opportunity. What started as a 3-year trial, turned into a permanent residency. Today they live in upstate New York, but come to the city on a frequent basis to get their timely shot of city life. Gert’s professional career mostly evolved around retail design and supplies, although in 2021 he decided to completely turn things around. Today he owns an online store for art reproductions and together with his husband he runs a gym and a retail store in Catskill.
Art and music have always been a big passion. Gert started classical piano at the age of 7 and discovered singing around the age of 15. He played and performed in a variety of ensembles, compositions and styles of music. Ranging from close harmony to musical theater, cover band to choir, from solo to accompanying other singers, classical, pop or jazz. In 2013 he joined Essential Voices, a mixed chorus under the direction of Judith Clurman. In 2014 he became its choir manager and held that role for 1.5 years. Gert has been on the board of Open Source Gallery since 2016 and operated in the position of Co-President until 2024. Gert is passionate, pragmatic, analytical and driven.
Gesa Kudlack
Gesa has a knack for production needs and embraces challenges. With almost 30 years of professional experience, she has held a wide array of positions in music, film & theatre, toured and worked throughout Europe, moved to the US in 2000, and has continued her work in New York since. Gesa received her business degree and MA in Arts & Culture Management in Germany, and is the Broadcast Stage Manager for the Metropolitan Opera. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, dips in the ocean waters all year round and is a glass-half-full person.
Lily White:
Saxophonist Lily White is one of the most engaging musicians on the New York jazz scene. Whether in small clubs or large concert halls, on alto, tenor, or soprano sax, Lily never fails to inject her sunny personality and sharp wit into her playing. In the past, Lily has caught the attention of the music’s most renowned veterans. She has worked with Mario Bauza, the father of latin jazz, and his Afro-Cuban jazz orchestra, touring with him in the final years before his death. She has done short stints with blues pianist Jay McShann, Dizzy Gillespie, and Celia Cruz to name a few. Since the release of her first CD under her own name,“Somewhere Between Truth and Fiction”on Knitting Factory works, her band has played festivals and clubs in Germany, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Lithuania, and Spain. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation among others. She is currently a member of Cynthia Hilts “Lyric Fury Orchestra,”a nine piece band that performs regularly in New York.
Michele Jaslow:
A pioneer shaping the current visual arts landscape in Brooklyn Michele Jaslow founded and served as Gallery Director of Brooklyn Artists Gym, serves on the Open Source Gallery board, and worked with The Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Arts Council, BRIC Arts Media, Coney Island Museum, Waterfront Museum, wagmag, and Photoville among others.
Michele holds an MFA Cranbrook, BFA Purchase, and post-graduate NYU New Media studies. She recently completed Appraisers Association of America’s comprehensive program and is USPAP compliant. Michele is member of American Alliance of Museums and Association of Art Museum Curators. @radarcurator | radarcuratorial.com
Amanda Alic:
Amanda Alic is and artist/designer/programmer who lives and works in Brooklyn, Ny. Her photography captures the construction of our personal and public character, domesticity, pleasure and discord. Her works range from “straight” photography to video processed images. She sometimes collaborates with husband Ethan Crenson with whom she has a son named Mac. Jointly, they run run a project called Fuse Works together. Fuse Works is a curatorial program which exhibits and promotes artists multiples and editioned work, books, video and digital art.
Stefan Hagen:
Stefan Hagen was born in Freiburg, Germany. He works since 1988 as a photographer in New York. In 2008, he founded the Montello Foundation, a foundation dedicated to support artists who foster our understanding of nature, its fragility, and the need to protect it. The foundation operates an artist retreat program in a remote stretch of Nevada desert for artists to experience and be inspired by the transformative natural setting. As a photographer, Hagen has held solo exhibitions in Boston, New York City, and Munich and participated in group exhibitions in Salt Lake City, New York and Colorado.
Alex Knowlton:
Alex Knowlton is the Director of Joe’s Pub at The Public, which is hailed as one of New York City’s most prestigious and genre-defying venues for emerging and established artists. Previously, he handled programming for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater and Appel Room in addition to producing the tours of Wynton Marsalis’s esteemed JALC Orchestra. Earlier in his career, Knowlton worked extensively in the realm of communications – managing marketing and public relations for both Joe’s Pub and globalFEST in New York, and, more recently, for Yoshi’s Jazz Club in Oakland, CA. At Yoshi’s, his focus turned to programming – he developed a free weekly music series, produced the Yoshi’s JazzFest in celebration of the venue’s 40th anniversary, and booked nightly performances. Knowlton received a B.S. in Music Industry from Northeastern University and currently resides in Brooklyn.
Danielle Bias:
A former longtime resident of Brooklyn, she currently resides in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Chief Communications Officer at The Museum of Contemporary Art (@moca). For nearly two decades, she has worked in the arts and culture sector, and prior to joining MOCA, she served as the Director of Global Corporate Communications at Audible.com, where she focuses on the creator community.
A native of Louisiana, after moving to New York in the early 2000s, Danielle began her professional career at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center and spent several years overseeing communications at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is also a dedicated community volunteer; and in addition to her role on the board of OS, she also currently serves as the co-chair of the Southern California Museums PR Committee. She previously held board positions with the Lower East Side Girls Club and the Central District Forum for the Arts.
Teresa Santamaria:
Teresa Santamaria’s work has brought her through the doors of many companies as consultant in project and program management, and most recently focusing on banking technology initiatives. Focusing on managing and communicating components of time, cost, materials and objectives, she has been able to apply these same principles to her volunteer work in Brooklyn. She is a Founding Trustee and first Chair of International School of Brooklyn’s Board of Trustees, a 501c3 International Baccalaureate K-8 language immersion school now in Carroll Gardens. She is currently Treasurer and Chair of the Finance Committee. Finding an intersection of community, family, creativity and purpose, Teresa and her family found an overlap in the Venn diagram of Open Source Mission, enrichment and goals. Teresa, supported by her family, is honored to be able to support the growth and fulfillment of OS objectives through Trustee work. Artist’s important works – held aloft by intentional support, fair wage and community – helps develop dimensions of humanity so needed in our world.
COMMITTEES:
Executive Committee:
Gesa Kudlack
Pim Zeegers
Gertjan Meijer
Monika Wuhrer
Alex Knowlton
Emma Lewis
Funding and Development Committee:
Committee Chair: Gertjan Meijer
Committee Member: Michele Jaslow
Committee Member: Teresa Santamaria
Artist Advisory Committee:
Committee Chair: Stefan Hagen
Francesco Simeti:
Francesco Simeti (b.1968, Palermo, Italy) lives and works in Brooklyn (New York). He is known for his site-specific installations using wallpapers, sculptures and 3D collage. He has shown internationally and has done permanent public art projects for the MTA and Percent for Art in NY, the CTA in Chicago and Multnomah County in Portland OR. His work is collected by The Cooper Hewitt, New York, The Philadelphia Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Civiche Raccolte Musei di Milano, Milan.
Jasmine Murrell:
Jasmine Murrell is a Brooklyn-based/ interdisciplinary artist that employs several different mediums to create sculptures, painting, photography, performance, installations, and films that blur the line between history, science, and mythology. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally for the past decade, in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art and Bronx Museum, Museum Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum, African-American Museum of Art, and the International Museum of Photography and untraditional institutions. Works have been included in book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora and New York Times, Time, Hyperallergic, The Detroit Times and several other publications.
Felipe Mujica:
Felipe Mujica (born in Santiago, Chile in 1974) studied art at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Just out of art school, in 1997, he co-founds with Diego Fernández and José Luis Villablanca the artist run space Galería Chilena (GCH), which operated between 1999 and 2005, first a nomadic and commercial art gallery and later as a collaborative art project, a curatorial “experiment”. In early 2000 Mujica moved to New York City where he currently lives and works. He has exhibited in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America, having solo shows at Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago; The Shop – Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing; Message Salon -Perla Mode, Zürich; Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago and Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne. Recent group shows include “Critical Complicity”, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; “The Nature of Things – Biennial of the Americas”, Denver; “Third Guangzhou Triennial”, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou and “Linea de Hormigas”, at A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro.
Margrethe Aanestad:
Margrethe Aanestad is a visual artist, born in 1974 in Stavanger, Norway. She has for many years divided her time living and working in both Brooklyn and Stavanger. In her practice she explores drawing, painting and sculpture, having shows internationally. Aanestad has also, through several occasions, collaborated with Open Source gallery over the years, both as exhibiting artist and as co-curator/producer. For almost a decade (2011-2020) her artistic work has included being co-founder and co-director of the non-profit artist-run space Prosjektrom Normanns. Through this project, she has curated and produced numerous exhibitions with contemporary Norwegian and international artists, as well as participating at many art fairs in both US and Europe.
Nicholas Galanin:
Nicholas Galanin (b. 1979) is a Tlingit/Unangax̂ multi-disciplinary artist. Galanin apprenticed with master carvers and jewelers, earned his BFA at London Guildhall University in Jewelry Design, and his MFA in Indigenous Visual Arts at Massey University in New Zealand. His work has been exhibited at the Heard Museum (AZ), Anchorage Museum (AK), Trench Contemporary (Vancouver, Canada), National Museum of the American Indian (NY), Sante Fe Art Institute (NM), and the Nevada Art Museum (NV) among many others. He lives and works with his family in Sitka, Alaska.
Immy Mali:
Immy lives and works in Kampala Uganda. Using a variety of media including, text, video, sound, sculpture, installation, animation, her work attempts to unpack the complexities and entanglements of memory and existence in a neo/postcolonial Uganda. Notions of presence and absence, personal memories of childhood growing up juxtaposed with current personal and collective experiences of existence also influence her work.
In 2013, she obtained a Bachelors degree in Industrial and Fine Arts from Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine arts, Makerere University, Kampala. She is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018-2019). Mali has participated in exhibitions, residencies and workshops in various countries including Kenya, India, Ethiopia, Denmark, Germany, USA, South Africa, (5th Asíko art school) Mozambique, Angola, and Uganda. Her work has been published in art magazines including the Africa arts journal 2019.
Kathleen McDermott:
Kathleen McDermott is an interdisciplinary artist and designer with a background in installation, prop-making and sculpture. She combines her knowledge of fabrication with open source hardware to build a language of absurdity that merges new media, design, performance, and video. She is interested in technologies that are not productive, robots badly suited to absurd purposes and electronic creations beyond her control. She has held residencies at the Museum of Art and Design in NY, Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Maine, and Textile Arts Center in NY, and has been exhibited internationally. In addition to her artistic practice, she is an advocate for accessible technology education, actively seeking opportunities to give workshops, and share her process and tutorials for working with DIY electronics.
Xyza Cruz Bacani
Xyza Cruz Bacani (b.1987) is a Filipina author and photographer based in New York and Hong Kong who uses her work to raise awareness about under-reported stories. Having worked as a second-generation domestic worker in Hong Kong for almost a decade, she is particularly interested in the intersections of migration, climate change and healthcare. She is one of the Magnum Foundation Photography Fellows in 2015, has exhibited worldwide, and won awards in photography. She is also the recipient of a resolution passed by the Philippines House of Representatives in her honour, HR No.1969. Xyza is one of the Asia 21 Young Leaders (Class of 2018), the WMA Commission grantee in 2017, a Pulitzer Center and an Open Society Moving Walls 2017 grantee. She is one of the BBC!s 100 Women of the World 2015, 30 Under 30 Women Photographers 2016, Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2016, Fujifilm ambassador and author of the book We Are Like Air. She is represented by: Redux Pictures New York City, USA and Christine Park Gallery: Shanghai, China. She graduated in 2022 with a M.A. Arts Politics from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University and was a New York 2015 Photography and Social Justice Fellow with the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. www.xyzacruzbacani.com
