The 37th Chelsea International Fine Art Competition Results, 2022/2023

Julie Reiss is an art historian with a focus on contemporary art that addresses the climate crisis. She has spoken on panels related to art and climate change including “Shifting Domains: Artists Respond to the Threatened Ecological Commons (Marfa Ballroom Dialogues, 2013), and “Landscape and Anthropocene” (College Art Association, 2016). She is the editor of Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene (2019). In 2019 she organized the symposium “The Role of Art in the Environmental Crisis” held at Christie’s Education, and was the guest critic on the same theme for The Brooklyn Rail. A pioneering scholar in the field of Installation art, she is also the author of From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (1999), in addition to numerous articles and reviews. She was previously the director of Modern and Contemporary Art and the Market, an accredited MA program at Christie’s Education. Reiss teaches graduate and undergraduate courses modern and contemporary art. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Angel Bellaran (she/her) is an independent curator & scholar with an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dublin, Ireland, and a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. A third-generation multi-racial American and visual arts activist, Bellaran was the first female and Latinx director of both the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and the Wellington B. Gray Gallery of East Carolina University School of Art and Design, in Greenville, North Carolina. Her curatorial practice is action-orientated and often collaborative, promoting inclusivity through representation: past projects include the Nasty Women Exhibition Movement (2016) and Toppled Monuments Archive (2020).

Bellaran’s academic research identifies and analyzes histories that challenge conventional wisdoms, with a focus on inspiring cultural change from within; in October of 2022, Bellaran shared her ground-breaking research into Black Mountain College’s diversity and recruitment strategies at the ReVIEWING Black Mountain College International Conference in Asheville, North Carolina. Currently in pursuit of a doctoral degree, Bellaran teaches for the non-profit organization Studio Montclair while managing the artist studios at Project for Empty Space, a self described “woman-run, femme-powered, People of the Global Majority/BIPOC, Queer, and unapologetically radical ecosystem for creatives” in Newark, New Jersey.