October 9 - 10
In-person and online

We are happy to support the Vera List Center's VLC Forum 2026: Matter of Intelligence celebrates the Jane Lombard Fellows, finalists for the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, alongside recipient Rosana Paulino.

In conversation with their nominators or invited guests, the Nepalese art collective ArTree Nepal, New York-based artist Stephanie Dinkins, Hawaiian and Samoan digital media theorist and poet Jason Edward Lewis from Canada, and Finnish artist Jenna Sutela share their nominated projects and their engagement with the material and intangible dimensions of intelligence.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10

12–1 pm | Jenna Sutela joins writer and collaborator Elvia Wilk to discuss Sutela’s prize-nominated project, “nimiia cétiï”—a work that brings together biological organisms and neural networks to imagine new forms of language and relation.

1 pm | Lunch

2–3 pm | Stephanie Dinkins revisits her landmark project “Conversations with Bina48” in a dialogue with abolitionist and educator Neta Bomani. The two discuss Dinkins’ ongoing exchange with the social robot Bina48, along with technological future histories, Afro-now-ism, and more-than-human knowledge.

3–4 pm | Jason Edward Lewis speaks with scholar, artist, and 2025–2027 Vera List Center Fellow Mashinka Hakopian about Abundant Intelligences, an Indigenous-led research program and network. Drawing on anticolonial approaches to technology, their conversation asks what becomes possible when AI is designed for human and non-human kin alike.

4–5 pm | ArTree Nepal members Lavkant Chaudhary, Mekh Limbu, and Subas Tamang are joined by Nepali American fashion designer Prabal Gurung for a conversation on ArTree’s “Tika Chhedna Angana” (“A Garden of Body Markings”)—a project centering on Indigenous tattooing practices in Nepal—opening a space to consider Indigenous pedagogies and embodied knowledge.

Learn more about the VLC Forum on The New Schools website.

Full program: