Board - NON:op

Board of Directors

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Saba Ayman-Nolley

Board President

Saba Ayman-Nolley is Professor Emerita and former chair of the psychology department at Northeastern Illinois University. Her PhD in Developmental and Educational Psychology is from the University of Chicago. Her research has explored areas of non-verbal communication and creativity as they relate to Children’s understanding of social concepts and roles. She has been a board member of the Jean Piaget Society and its Vice-President of communications. She has also developed and implemented training programs and curriculum for teachers and parents. For the last ten years she has been an organizer of the Art in Response to Violence international conference. She has received over 10 research grants and authored over 75 presentations and publications.

Ja Nelle Davenport-Pleasure

Director

Poet, recycle/up-cycle artist, fashion designer, dancer, aspiring bass player, and Urbana Poet Laureate, Ja Nelle Davenport-Pleasure has immersed herself in the arts for more than three decades. She has engaged audiences throughout the United States and internationally and strives to help people of all ages to express themselves creatively through writing, spoken word, music, dance, and other art forms. She shares her gifts and passions with all in her community in hopes of building a brighter tomorrow.

Ja Nelle has written two books of poetry, a chapbook titled Eyes Open and her second Splitting 650. Her third book Breathe will be out this summer. She is a member of the Galaxy of Poets group that works to bring awareness and support to mental health through the art of words. She performs at Soul on Sunday, a group that enriches the poetry and music scene in Urbana. She joined forces with Urbana’s previous Poet Laureate, Ashanti Files to host workshops for the Writers of Oya, and performed alongside Will Reger, Urbana’s first Poet Laureate, in this year’s Central Illinois Rivers in Art and Poetry event. Davenport-Pleasure was selected as the 2020 Artist Ace Awards winner and also founded Cinderella/Cinderfella, a ballroom dance troupe for children. She has performed her poetry at SPEAK Café, Pygmalion, Iron Post, and many other events in Urbana.

Theo Economides

Treasurer

Theo Economides is a techno-creative enabler. With more than 30 years experience in the TV and radio, audiovisual, higher education, telecommunications, and legal environments plus a lifetime of musical and theatrical performing, he brings an unconventional blend of expertise to telling stories through technology-enabled performances.

Mr. Economides spends his days working for Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management as an AV engineer. His degrees are in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, but he is also a videographer, accomplished pianist, singer, musical conductor and educator. A musician since the age of eight years, he also teaches private voice and piano students, is a ten-year member (and past administrator) of Chicago’s "Too Hot to Handel" choir and directed musical theatre orchestras, church musicians and men’s a cappella choruses for more than a decade.

He is also a skilled communicator, fluent in English and Geek and able to translate between the two for any audience.

He is a Certified Legal Video Specialist (CLVS), sat on the Board of Directors for the Visual Communications Industries Group for three years and also the advisory board of MacCormac College in Chicago for four years. He is a member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers and the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers.

Kao Ra Zen

Director

Kenya "Kao Ra Zen" Fulton is a spoken-word poet, rapper, multimedia performance artist, painter, director, and curator born and raised in Chicago, IL. For several years, he has been performing and organizing concerts, parties, film screenings, and art happenings throughout Chicago, notably his annual HIPPY HOLY DAZE art and music holiday celebrations; KULTURE KLASH art film/video showcases; and the ‘A PERFORMANCE HAPPENING’ series. Kao has performed and exhibited in Germany, rocked open MICs in Guatemala, was a feature performer during events such as the first annual Afro Utah Festival in 2021; the Chicago Hip-Hop Theater Fest and TEDx Showtime ChiTime events in 2022; and the New Performance Turku Biennale in Finland in 2023. Kao‘s creative writing has been published in numerous poetry collections, magazines, and websites. He has performed at notable venues in Chicago such as Symphony Center, Harris Theater, Links Hall, Elastic Arts, Alhambra Palace, and the DANK Haus. Kao is a member of International Art Group artist collective; the legendary Nacrobats Hip-Hop crew; and was a member of the Firqit Surayah dance troupe. He has worked on multiple projects with organizations such as ’Every house has a door‘, ’NON:op Open Opera Works’, and will soon be presenting programming with the Guild Literary Complex. Kao has an Associate of Fine Arts degree from Harold Washington College, a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is now in the MFA Creative Writing program at Chicago State University. He has released several music videos and is currently working on multiple music-related projects.

Arlene Malinowski

Director

As actor, playwright, and teaching, artist Arlene views her solo work as an artistic extension of the social justice work she has been committed to for the last 30 years. She has toured work across the US and internationally. Arlene is recipient of Fellowship at University Illinois Chicago Department of Disability in the Arts. Finalist in the New Plays From the Heartland, semi-finalist the O’Neill and Blue Ink Award. Nominated for LA Theater Ovations, LA Garland Award. As an actor she has worked in film, television and theater. She is a Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists where she developed and teaches the Solo/Story curriculum. She is touring with Little Bit Not Normal, a solo play intended to create dialogue around the subject of mental illness.

Christophe Preissing

Secretary

Christophe Preissing is a sound/composer, intermedia artist, improvisor, producer, and artistic instigator whose work engages the contradictions of liminality, memory and decay, perception and projection, preservation and loss using archives, mapping, and taxonomies to connect artist and audience through clouds of meaning. His work—both intentional and indeterminate—relies on paradox and ambiguity, found and built objects, individual and embodied memory, and the happy accident. He has been Artist-in-Residence and Fellow at Beloit College, Indiana University, Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Djerrassi, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, and has received awards from Jerome Foundation, Meet the Composer, Illinois Arts Council, City of Chicago, and American Composers Forum. He received a Pritzker Foundation Endowed Fellowship in support of a Djerassi residency. He is the founder of NON:op Open Opera Works and his social practice work responds to the pandemic, to systemic oppression and racism, and to economic hardship and political division. Recent projects include NON:op‘s L’sGA (2023), VIRAL SILENCE (2021-2022), SAY THEIR NAMES, an online memorial and interactive map that remembers Black Americans killed by police (2020–), and HPSCHD@50 a 50th anniversary production of Cage and Hiller‘s HPSCHD (2020); MEMORIA DE MEMORIA, a composition for 12 voices that remembers Chicago’s homicide victims (2022), BLOOD LINES: an installation remembering the victims of the 1919 Chicago uprising (2019), a setting of the INFERNO from Dante’s Divine Comedy at the University of Notre Dame (2016). Currently he is working on the score for Natasha Maidoff’s film, MOTHERBOARD, and with artist Amanda Love on LOSS, an installation about memory, censorship, and loss.

Kyle Gregory Price

Director

Kyle Gregory Price is a genre-fluid composer, percussionist and turntablist by trade, who regularly produces work in other mediums including stop-motion animation, jewelry making, costume design and dance/movement. He has been a practicing artist for over twenty years. Since moving to Chicago in 2010 he has performed solo and collaboratively, and served as the composer and bandleader in numerous projects.In 2014, Kyle and Deirdre Harrison co-founded The Lucky Trikes, a story-telling chamber band for children that has featured “third-wheel” guests from the classical, new music, and free-jazz scenes. The Lucky Trikes has performed countless times across the Chicagoland area and has been featured at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Newberry Library, and beyond.

Kyle has brought his music to a range of audiences at landmark Chicago venues, including the Green Mill, The Hideout, and Empty Bottle as well as numerous DIY venues. In 2018 he was featured on Experimental Sound Studio’s Oscillations series. He has performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art with the Merce Cunningham Dancers on the opening day of MCA’s 2017 Merce Cunningham: Common Time exhibition and performed in the world premiere of The Bell Ringers, an epic participatory work by Danny Clay, commissioned by Third Coast Percussion, at Millennium Park on September 9, 2019.

Kyle is starting the MFA Program in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fall 2023.