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Our Team
Nato Thompson
Nato Thompson is an author, curator, and what he describes as “cultural infrastructure builder”. He has worked as Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary, Philadelphia Contemporary, and Creative Time as Artistic Director and as Curator at MASS MoCA.
Thompson organized major Creative Time projects including The Creative Time Summit (2009–2015), Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy (2016), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), Living as Form (2011), Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures (2012), Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is (2009, with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), among others.
Nato Thompson has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life (2017).
Amber Imrie
Amber Imrie (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator whose work and teaching grow out of the Ozark landscape where they were raised off-the-grid in a queer, rural community. Their practice explores place-based mythologies, ecological transformation, and the quiet architectures of belonging through photography, textiles, installation, and poetic language.
This sensibility carries into their educational work, where they build learning environments rooted in curiosity, embodiment, and cross-cultural dialogue.
Imrie holds an MFA from Stanford University—where they received the Anita Squires Fowler Award in Photography—and a BA with honors from UC Berkeley, where they were awarded Excellence in Sculpture. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, the Bates Museum of Art, 21C Museum Hotel Bentonville, and the San Francisco Art Fair, and is held in multiple permanent collections.
As an educator and community-builder, Imrie has taught and mentored artists across universities, artist-run initiatives, and global programs, including UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and The Alternative Art School (TAAS), where they are a founding team member leading curriculum, pedagogy, and international programming. Their teaching emphasizes embodied practice, sustainable creative rhythms, and collective learning as a form of artistic research.
Imrie has received numerous awards—including the Artist 360 Practicing Artist Grant, the Creative Exchange Fund Spectra Grant, and the Murphy Cadogan Award—and has been an artist-in-residence with ACRE, ChaNorth, Elsewhere Studios, and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. They have also contributed to curatorial and editorial ecosystems as founder of Venison Magazine (2014–2017), co-director of the micro-residency Camp Venison, and through jury and panel work with Independent Curators International, ArtBo International Art Fair in Bogotá, EXPO Chicago, and other regional and international platforms.
You can see Amber’s art on her personal website here: www.amberimrie.com
