Summer Guthery is a curator, writer, and arts organizer based in New York City. She was Director of Canal Projects from 2022 to 2025, where she led the organization’s curatorial vision and programming. She is also the founder and director of JOAN, a nonprofit exhibition space in Los Angeles dedicated to emerging and underrepresented artists.

Guthery has organized exhibitions with artists including Pippa Garner, Candice Lin, Korakrit Arunanondchai, and Truong Cong Tung, among many others. She previously held curatorial roles at LAXART in Los Angeles and the Performa Biennial in New York, and served as curator-in-residence at Disjecta in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies. Guthery is a regular contributor to Frieze, and her writing has also appeared in Artforum, ArtReview, and Art in America.

Francesca Sonara is a curator, collector, and arts philanthropist based in New York City, invested in building innovative nonprofit arts platforms. Over the past 15 years, she has served as Director of Communications and Programming at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, advisor to a Private Collection in Northern California, and as a board member of JOAN in Los Angeles. She currently runs an exhibition space for solo artist presentations from her home in Brooklyn Heights.

Sonara holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and has dedicated her practice to nurturing new models of nonprofit arts spaces that support experimental and underrepresented artists. Her work emphasizes collaboration, audience engagement, and sustainable structures for cultural experimentation, advancing a vision of arts organizations as dynamic, responsive, and community-rooted platforms for contemporary creativity.