This panel, comprised of influential artists and arts professionals, looks at how the art ecosystem has evolved in South Florida. Panelists will discuss ways the consensus process is formed on new art and how the local and global art-world multiverses intersect.

Moderated by Dejha Carrington, Executive Director, Commissioner

 

 

 

About Curator Circle

Curator Circle is NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s affinity group designed for the Next Generation of art enthusiasts, aspiring collectors, and Museum supporters!

This unique and exciting membership gives you the opportunity to directly participate in the Museum’s permanent collection by contributing to the Acquisition Fund dedicated to the selection and purchase of artworks, while enjoying the benefits of stimulating and engaging events, and exclusive access to the art world.

 

Dejha Carrington

Dejha Carrington is a cultural practitioner and administrator in the arts. In 2017, she co-founded Commissioner, a collaborative program that helps people support and collect the work of contemporary artists in their cities. As Executive Director, Dejha has introduced Commissioner in Miami, Detroit, New York, Montreal, Mexico City, and New Orleans, cultivating a growing network of emerging patrons who collectively support more than 50 artist commissions across the U.S. From 2015 to 2022, she served as Vice President of Strategic Communications for the National YoungArts Foundation. Previously, Dejha led global public relations initiatives for the Kimball Art Museum, the Medellin Biennial in Colombia, and the National Film Board of Canada. She is a board member of the MAP Fund in New York, the Community Justice Project in Miami, and The Black School, an experimental schoolhouse in New Orleans. Additionally, she serves as a professional advisory member of Miami-Dade Art in Public Places and the New York University Center for Black Visual Culture’s Black Rest Project. Dejha frequently collaborates with the Center for Global Black Studies at the University of Miami, where she is the 2025 Creative Futures Fellow, and teaches at the New World School of the Arts at Miami-Dade College. She is a graduate of McGill University.

 

Catherine Mary Camargo

(b. 1998, Miami, FL) is a curator, writer, and artist of Haitian and British heritage. She is the founder of Queue Gallery x Q Magazine, a gallery and mirrored publication based in downtown Miami. The gallery represents artists who merge minimalism with subversive narratives, while the magazine serves as a rotating archive of contemporary art and local history. Camargo’s curatorial and artistic practice examines systemic barriers, migration, and vulnerability through minimalist and unconventional aesthetics. Her research and writing critique oppressive systems while embracing discomfort as a catalyst for new perspectives. Her personal writing—produced more often than shared—functions as both intuitive research guiding her curatorial vision and a means of testing her own capacity for vulnerability.

 

Wendy François

Wendy is a native of Miami with Haitian roots and serves as Commercial Counsel for late-stage start-up Andela, where she advises senior management and business partners on all aspects of commercial transactions and product development. Wendy has prior legal experience in corporate transactions and corporate real estate, and prior business experience in the consumer and retail sectors. She is a lover of arts and culture, and is an Ambassador of the PAMM Fund for Black Art, serves as co-chair for the PAMM’s annual Art + Soul Celebration, is a founding member and board member of the Future Bass at The Bass Museum of Art, and serves as a board member of Ten North, formerly the Opa-locka Community Development Corporation, which creates impact in underserved communities through real estate development and art.

 

Luna Palazzolo-Daboul

(b. 1991, Mar del Plata, Argentina) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Miami. A self-taught artist, she developed her practice through years of assisting other artists and working in conservation, shaping a language that moves between sculpture, installation, performance, and digital media.

Drawn to industrial and labor-intensive materials, Palazzolo-Daboul creates works that embrace iteration and replication, investing objects with symbolic weight while questioning permanence, identity, and devotion. Her practice draws from minimalist movements of the 1960s–70s, South American folk traditions, Beat Generation poets, and the writings like Ernest Becker, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mark Twain. The result is an iconoclastic approach that unravels themes of morality, faith, and the contradictions of the human condition, often exposing resistance and subtle irony as critiques of society.

Her solo exhibitions include Closer (Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, 2023), UBI SUNT (Edge Zones, Miami, 2021), Fantasy Life (Rice Hotel, Miami, 2025), and an early career retrospective at the Miami Design District curated by Karen Grimson. Selected group shows include Hikarie Hall (Tokyo), Zilberman Gallery (Miami), Piero Atchugarry Gallery (Miami), and Primary Projects (Miami).

She is the recipient of a Wavemaker Grant funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation, awards from the Broward Cultural Division, a Miami Individual Artist Grant, and the Oolite Live-In Residency. In 2025, Palazzolo-Daboul is a Season 7 Commissioner Artist and has presented work in curated exhibitions at Voloshyn, Green Space Miami, and KDR Miami.

Beyond her studio practice, she is the founder of Tunnel Projects, an artist-run initiative located in an underground plaza in Miami. Tunnel Projects provides studios, exhibitions, and community-driven programming operating independently.

 

Kennedy Yanko

Working with paint skins and found metal, Kennedy Yanko constructs sublime sculptures and architecturally scaled installations that defy the limits of their own materiality. Steeped in the visual language of Abstract Expressionism, Action, and Color Field Painting, Yanko’s works cast off the boundaries of their medium, occupying the generative spaces between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, surreal and earthbound.

Central to Yanko’s practice is her work with paint skins – a material created by pouring many gallons of paint onto a flat surface that is lifted and shaped into a tarp-like entity once it’s nearly dry. Yanko positions these abstracted painterly gestures within the meticulously crafted metal armatures she has sourced, welded, torched, and bent. The process of marrying paint with metal is laborious, requiring both power and innovation to twist and mold the skins onto their dynamic salvaged supports.

Despite the conspicuous solidity of Yanko’s materials, her sculptures and installations often appear weightless – as if they were on the verge of taking flight or drawing breath. By employing paint skin and metal in ways that both transmute a bodily essence and reposition the logic of gravity and form, Yanko works to expand and challenge the limits of her viewers’ perception.

This troubling of the metaphysical, an outgrowth of Yanko’s diverse philosophical interests, is at the core of the artist’s practice. A long-time follower of Daoism and an avid student of theosophic ideologies, Yanko’s cyclic repurposing of her materials alludes to the infinite possibilities for their reinterpretation through the very act of making. For Yanko, abstraction is a vehicle for encountering clarity — the pulse of intuition mixed with the thrill of a chance encounter. In the making, the artist becomes a conduit for future systems for renewal and regeneration.

Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, St. Louis, MO) has been included in significant exhibitions at the Albertina Modern (2024); Brooklyn Museum (2022; 2024); CFHill (2022); Parrish Art Museum (2022); Rubell Museum (2021), where she was the 2021-2022 Artist in Residence and first sculptor to hold the residency; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019). Yanko’s work is held in major private and institutional collections such as Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, FL; Espacio Tacuari, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Firestorm Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Ståhl Collection, Norrköping, Sweden; and Stora Väsby Sculpture Park, Upplands Väsby, Sweden.

Image by Seleen Saleh, 2023