Curator
STEPHIA MADLEYNE KASCHER holds a Masters of Arts in Media Studies and acquired a Graduate Certificate in Media Management at The New School for Public Engagement in New York City, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude. Concentrations included Media and Education, Media and Social Awareness, New and Social Media, Film Theory, and all aspects of Audio and Visual Production. Prior to obtaining her Master’s degree, Stephia received her Bachelors of Arts in Anthropology and Women’s Studies at The State University of New York at New Paltz, where she focused on Cultural Anthropology, Gender Studies and Feminist Theory. She graduated Summa Cum Laude with Honors and was presented with two Outstanding Achievement Awards. Her Honors’ Program Thesis, which was met with extensive academic accolades, was entitled “Beneath the Pavement, the Beach:” Reflexive Intellectualism and the Performance of Disruption.”
“I quote others only to better express myself.”~ Michel de Montaigne
Stephia works as a Conceptual Collage Artist -a creative entrepreneur skilled at remixing theoretical constructions and reconstructions to both create and make sense of the world. Interested in the overlap, the spaces in-between, the unspoken, and the revolutionary, Stephia strives to operate as much as possible outside the status-quo. This means, among other things, a continuous questioning of everything. Blind conformity is silently deadening and true freedom lies in boundless creative expression. This can only be attained by shedding the normalizing pressures of others’ expectations and avoiding the constrictions of linear paths.
“The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.” ~ Walter Bagehot
A boundary-crosser and a student of life, Stephia seeks inspiration everywhere. As bell hooks writes in her introduction to Outlaw Culture: “Merging critical thinking in everyday life with knowledge learned in books and through study has been the union of theory and practice that has informed my intellectual cultural work” (3). Passionately concerned with education for critical consciousness, Stephia continually searches for new ways to think, teach, and write that excite and liberate the mind and engages in projects that incite passion to live. Conventional pedagogy and its emphasis on specialization is limiting and deadening after a fashion. Interdisciplinary work and thought however – combining theory and practice as a pedagogical life strategy – is the panacea for this. So, like hooks, Stephia searches for modes in which to live life as “a radical outsider, someone who only [feels] at home in the margins” (hooks 3). hooks writes: “[We] cross boundaries to take another look, to contest, to interrogate, and in some cases to recover and redeem” (5). Put another way: “The outcast in our world know something very important. In fact, it just this exclusion that actually fuels their fires of dissent” (Rose 77).
In addition to several New Media ventures, an Oral History Project, and her work as a Freelance Creative, Stephia heads the fledgling freelance cooperative Black Dog Creatives, and is currently completing a book on practicing Creative Intelligence in the Field of Activity.
Stephia splits her time between Brooklyn and Woodstock, NY.
