Nancy Weekly is the Burchfield Scholar for the Burchfield Penney Art Center, a museum dedicated to Charles E. Burchfield and artists from the Buffalo/Niagara region. Her exhibitions offer different perspectives on Burchfield’s work, for example, by comparison with Seneca artist, G. Peter Jemison, poet Walt Whitman, and painter Mike Glier. She has also curated exhibitions about Buffalo’s first African American architect John E. Brent, painter Jackie Felix, sculptor Christy Rupp, and photographers Marion Faller and Milton Rogovin, to name a few. She retired from teaching at the State University of New York. In 2024, she presented “Charles Burchfield’s Synesthetic Art Legacy” at the University of Oxford in England and is currently organizing Song of the Tree Cricket: Synesthesia and the Senses for presentation at the Burchfield Penney in 2028.

Ali Banisadr (American, born in Iran, 1976) creates expansive, intricately layered paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculptures that balance improvisation with careful orchestration. Drawing from sonic memory, mythology, history, literature, and the natural world, his work unfolds in layered, dreamlike environments where memory, perception, and the human condition intersect. Banisadr’s visual language synthesizes influences ranging from Persian miniature painting and Venetian Renaissance painting to Romanticism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. His work is held in major public collections including the British Museum, Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and LACMA. Following his first major U.S. museum survey at the Katonah Museum of Art (2025), which will travel to several institutions, Banisadr currently has a solo exhibition at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. He lives and works between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley, New York.