June 27, 2025: Pedantic Summer 2025 Cohort Farewell Open House

zhanraw (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans sound, film, poetry, performance, and installation. A Ukrainian immigrant with a career in science, data, & technology, her art integrates computer mediated methods with deeply humanistic themes. Her recent work, Unsaid 1 & 2, debuted in 2024 with a live performance by the Bergamot Quartet, Payton MacDonald (marimba), multi-channel audio, and video projection. Like many prior works, it endeavors to slow down and let blossom the interstitial and manifold aspects of experience: matters of attention, conditions of embodiment, perceptions of self, time, the other, and one’s environment. Her interdisciplinary approach reflects her fascination with how technology can bridge the personal and the societal, turning complex questions into immersive experiences that provoke both thought and feeling.

Alison Lacher (she/her) is a visual artist, curator, and arts administrator based in Springfield, Illinois. She is a two-time recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award, recognized for both her independent and collaborative practices. She has been awarded residencies with the Ellis Beauregard Foundation, Ox-Bow, ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, The Luminary, and Signal Fire on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

She serves as Director of the Visual Arts Gallery at the University of Illinois Springfield and Co-Director of STNDRD Exhibitions, a curatorial platform dedicated to site-responsive contemporary art. She has curated exhibitions at venues that include the Illinois State Museum, Monaco, the Chicago Artists Coalition, Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts, and NON STNDRD at the National Building Arts Center, as well as for the Terrain Biennial. Lacher has been a HATCH Projects curatorial resident with the Chicago Artists Coalition and a guest artist and curator at institutions including the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Washington University in St. Louis. 

TyLie Shider (he/him) is an American writer, a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellow, and the inaugural playwright in residence at ArtYard. A McKnight Fellow in Playwriting at the Playwrights’ Center, he is a recipient of Premiere Stages’ Liberty Live commission, two consecutive Jerome Fellowships, and an I Am Soul playwright in residence at the National Black Theatre. Recent projects include Security Watch, Certain Aspects of Conflict in the Negro Family, The Gospel Woman, Whittier and his filmmaking debut Sign O’ the Times. Screenwriting credits include: Truant. He holds a BA in Journalism from Delaware State University and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU. A proud member of the Dramatist Guild, he is currently a Professor of Graduate Playwriting at Pace University, and a staff writer for Minnesota Playlist where he writes a regular column on Creative Discipline.