Meet our Distinguished Participants—respected voices, talented artists and accomplished professionals within our community whose perspective and expertise elevate each of our 2025 Venice Art Walk + Auction special programs. We’re honored by their presence and participation in this year’s events and invite you to learn more about them below.
Nancy Buchanan is a pioneering Los Angeles-based artist whose practice spans performance, video, drawing, and installation. Emerging from the feminist art movement of the 1970s, she was a founding member of F Space Gallery alongside artists like Chris Burden. Her work often critiques social structures, particularly around power, gender, and surveillance, while also exploring healing through feminist and community-based practices. Her work has been seen domestically and internationally, and she is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist grants, a COLA grant, and a Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at MOMA, MOCA, the Centre Pompidou, the Getty Research Institute, and was included in four of the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time exhibitions; in 2022, her work was included in the Carnegie International.
Emily Barker is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles whose work addresses disability justice, accessibility, and systemic inequities. Their installations and sculptures critique the built environment and healthcare systems, showing how these spaces exclude and harm disabled people. Barker is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, and their work Death by 7865 Paper Cuts, 2019 was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt (MMK). They have exhibited in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, and the MMK, Frankfurt exhibition Crip Time alongside Mike Kelly, Isa Genzkin and Cady Noland. Barker has given artist talks at the Royal College of Art and Design in London, Otis College of Art and Design, at UCLA, and at The Whitney Museum.
Kyoko Takenaka is a performance artist, photographer, filmmaker, butoh dancer, musician, actor, and teacher based between Turtle Island and Japan. Centering their work in the in-between, they create work around diasporic longing as it relates to cycles found in nature, Japanese mythology, disability justice, queer belonging, and the ethereal realm. Their name means “vibrations of sound child” in Japanese.
Their work has been featured on Nowness, HBO, the LA Times, BOMB Magazine, and Far-Near; performed and exhibited at the Lincoln Center, Autograph ABP, and venues worldwide. They’ve released two albums, Planet Q, and Wastewomxn, centering themes of queer liberation and Afro-Asia unity with artists of the African and Asian diaspora.
Most recently, with support from Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Kyoko debuted I’m here and I love you— a preview of their first post-cancer interdisciplinary work that challenges stigmas around illness and highlights the power of applying frameworks of social movements to personal healing and collective care through artistic practice.
Dominique Clayton is an arts consultant, writer, and gallerist born and raised in Los Angeles. Clayton is the founder of Dominique Gallery, a storefront and pop-up exhibition and online program which showcases and advises emerging artists, marginalized artists and artists raising families. In addition to the gallery, Clayton often serves as a guest curator, most recently organizing the group exhibition Ode to Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena now on view at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.
Clayton also serves on the curatorial and programming committee of Destination Crenshaw, a forthcoming outdoor art museum and arts program based in the historic Crenshaw community of Los Angeles. Clayton previously worked as Manager of the Founding Director’s office at The Broad and later as an interim director at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery.
Marley Ralph, also known as Namaste Marley Rae, is a 500-hour certified yoga instructor, wellness educator, and Co-Founder of WalkGood LA, a nonprofit rooted in healing, movement, and social justice. She serves as the Director of Health & Wellness at The WalkGood Yard, a creative wellness studio in Los Angeles, where she leads accessible yoga and mindfulness practices centered on collective care.