In/Between 2026: reclamation mirrored

Initiated in 2019 by artist Yanira Castro as part of her Live Feed residency at New York Live Arts, In/Between is an annual immigrant artist group exhibition originally created by artists Yanira Castro, Martita Abril, and Poppy DeltaDawn. The exhibition features and supports participants of NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. The name In/Between reflects on the multiplicity of immigrant artists’ experiences, identities, practices, and politics, while also speaking to the liminal experience of home/residence/community.

The mentoring program pairs immigrant artists with mentors who guide them to achieve specific career goals while providing them with broader access to the New York cultural world. It brings mentees together with mentors as well as other program participants to navigate their shared experiences and the challenges of being an immigrant artist.

NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS
New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) is a nonprofit service organization that empowers working artists and emerging arts organizations across all disciplines at critical stages in their creative lives and professional/organizational development. Through the Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (IAP), NYFA is building and serving a community of artists with diverse backgrounds who share the experience of immigration. The program connects artists with services and resources to foster their creative careers, helping them gain support and exposure for their work and integrate into the cultural world of New York and beyond while upholding their distinct identities.

Yanira Castro is an interdisciplinary artist born in Borikén (Puerto Rico) and living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn). Castro forms iterative, multimodal projects that center the complexity of land, citizenship, and governance in works activated and performed by the public. Co-creating with a team of collaborators under the name a canary torsi, she investigates choreography as a practice of collective embodiment, grappling with agency and communal action as a body politic. She has developed over fifteen projects that have been recognized with national awards, commissions and residency support. Her most recent work, a public art project during the 2024 election, Exorcism = Liberation, utilized campaign materials (stickers, pins, lawn signs, banners) to proliferate–across NYC, Chicago, and Western Massachusetts–slogans and QR codes that led to immersive sonic experiences. The work partnered with over twenty-five community organizations across NYC, Chicago, and Western Massachusetts, calling for mutual liberation and partnering with over 25 community/arts organizations. acanarytorsi.org

Martita (Pichu) Abril  is from the border city of Tijuana, México. She has collaborated with dance artists and companies including AUNTS, Lux Boreal, Kim Brandt, Yanira Castro, Yoshiko Chuma, Milka Djordevich, Tess Dworman, Daria Fain and Robert Kocik, Allyson Green, Abigail Levine, Mina Nishimura, Cori Olinghouse, Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Will Rawls, David Thompson, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Cathy Weis, and Andros Zins-Browne. Martita was a performer in Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions, the Handles exhibition by Haegue Yang, and the Mirrors I & II piece by Joan Jonas at the Museum of Modern Art. She was part of the Fresh Tracks Residency, the Dance and Process (DAP) artist in residency program at The Kitchen in partnership with Arts and Letters, and the Movement Research (MR) Artist-in-Residence Program, funded, in part, by Mertz Gilmore Foundation. Martita has been a recipient of international residencies in Ecuador, Mexico, Latvia, and most recently Budapest, and Prague which were supported by the GPS/Global Practice Sharing Program of Movement Research with funding from the Trust for Mutual Understanding. She currently guides workshops in gardens for Spanish speaking families who recently arrived in NYC, through the iLAND (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance) program in collaboration with El Puente. She is currently the Director of MR at the Judson Church Monday night series, she continues to mentor Immigrant artists as part of the NYFA Coaching program, and is a member of NYFA’s Artist Advisory Committee. Martita was a co-curator for Sundays On Broadway with Cathy Weis Projects in 2025 for their Spring and Fall season and currently she is co-curator in residency at La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival.

Zahra Banyamerian is a Program Officer at the Vilcek Foundation, where she is responsible for the strategic planning and implementation of the Vilcek Foundation Prizes and leads the development of the Foundation’s annual prizes program. As a curator, Banyamerian develops exhibitions and installations for the New York Foundation for the Arts, includingIntersecting Realities, The Poetics of Material and Memory, Tapestry of Imagination, A Space of Fantasy, A View from the Mountain Top, In a Different Light, and Invincible Beings, among others. Banyamerian earned her Master’s degree in Art History from the City College of New York, where her thesis examined the intersecting roles of nostalgia, politics, and gender in artistic production in Iran. She holds a BFA in Painting and an MA in Art Studies from the University of Tehran, as well as a post-baccalaureate degree in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.