Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose immersive works, performances, and audience-participatory scores implicate the viewer-participant into future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Asgary has exhibited and performed at such places as ARoS Kunstmuseum, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, and Minnesota Street Project, and has received support through numerous residencies and awards, some of which include UCLA Art Sci (2021), MASS MoCA (2021), Headlands Center for the Arts, and an Emergency Grant from The Foundation for Contemporary Art (2021)

Dena A. Al-Adeeb is an Iraqi born scholar, artist, and cultural worker. As a practicing artist, Al-Adeeb creates performative works dedicated to participatory and socially engaged art, and collaborative projects. Her artwork investigates the relationship among the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of mapping collective memory, refugee narratives, and war-torn architecture and geographies. Al-Adeeb’s research focuses on global war geographies and oil economies as they manifest through infrastructure, material and visual culture, and collective memory. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled: The Architecture Of War: The Destructions of Iraq And The Rise Of Petro-cultural Imaginaries In The Persian Gulf Region. A current Mellon Artist and Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, a Visiting Scholar at the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Davis and Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her work has also been exhibited internationally at such places as Mana Contemporary, Museum of Tunisia, Art 13: London: Modern and Contemporary Art Fair, and the Arab American National Museum.

Leyya Mona Tawil [Lime Rickey International] is an artist working with sound, performance, and hybrid transmissions. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Her work has been presented throughout the states, Europe and the Arab world. Tawil was the 2020 ISSUE Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow and a 2018 Saari Fellow (Finland). Her work 'Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith' was nominated for a 2019 Bessie Award in Music. In 2021, Tawil was a resident artist with Wysing Art Centre/British Council (UK) and the Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE). She is director of TAC, a venue in Oakland; and Arab.AMP – a platform for experimental art and music from the SWANA diaspora.

Soundwave NEXT is a partnership between Gray Area and Soundwave SF to explore the future of sound. The program invites curators, artists, producers, or collectives to present new performance-based works or productions based in sound. For nearly two decades, Soundwave has provided a platform for artists to explore sound and create immersive experiences that captivate, inspire and challenge our own experience and reality. Throughout that time, Gray Area has become a leading institution in using art and technology for civic and social impact.