collaborators

Gia M. Hamilton, cultural practitioner and entrepreneur, has worked at the heart of art, healing, food security and education to help build sustainable communities for the past 20 years. Hamilton, a native New Orleanian, received her Bachelor’s in cultural anthropology with a minor in visual art from New York University and her Master’s in applied anthropology from City University of New York. For 15 years in New York City, Hamilton worked with non-profit organizations, grassroots collectives and individuals refining her interdisciplinary practice. As a researcher conducting field-work, she used her training as management consultant, community organizer, life coach, and facilitator in the New York public school system to develop violence prevention pedagogy and curricula. And in 2006, Gia Hamilton co-founded the project-based learning independent school Little Maroons in Brooklyn. Hamilton founded Gris Gris Lab as a place based incubator and cultural exchange space to ensure that emerging thought leaders could actualize their interdisciplinary projects through an innovative live-work model in Central City. Later, Gris Gris Lab grew and formed a team of social scientists who began cultural consulting to further support and strengthen the local economies of non-profits and small businesses in New Orleans, Washington D.C., Detroit and New York City. Gia Hamilton joined the Joan Mitchell Center in 2011 as a consultant and was appointed Director in July 2013. She comes to the Joan Mitchell Center as the designer of the artist-in-residence program, community engagement strategies, public programs and operational systems. In 2015, in addition to her work at the Joan Mitchell Center, she concurrently founded Afrofuture Society, an online platform for the arts community of African descent which provides opportunities for visibility and communication across discipline throughout the arts ecosystem. Lastly, she co-curated the Atlanta Biennial in August of 2016 using an anthropological gaze of the southern region in the United States while referencing the global south. Hamilton works in New Orleans and continues to design programs and exhibitions through a number of multi media platforms and [un]conference style gatherings across the country.