About

Lungs Project is a curatorial collective and independent publishing press founded in 2016 by MA Curating graduates of the University of Sunderland in the UK. The team currently consists of Angela Burdon and Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz.

Operating between the US and the UK (and sometimes Turkey), Lungs Project is established as a transnational platform to promote the work of artists and writers from chronically underrepresented backgrounds. The project focuses on building a supportive, collaborative community of early-career artists and writers by merging contemporary art, photography, and literature to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogues. As an independent organization, it strives to create new opportunities for emerging creatives while fostering critical thought and experimental methodologies through publishing and curating exhibitions both in traditional and digital contexts. Lungs Project employs various publishing models as curatorial praxis to highlight more democratized and decentralized forms of producing and disseminating knowledge.

Lungs Project’s activities are deeply rooted in the politics and ethics of cultural production and working towards a formulation of curatorial & editorial activism. Some of Lungs team’s interests include feminist art, the African diaspora and the Black Atlantic, photography, storytelling, collaborative creations, dance, and movement. In September 2016, the inaugural issue of their annual contemporary art and literature journal was successfully launched in Sunderland, along with an accompanying pop-up exhibition called Emerging! The second issue was launched in October 2017 in Newcastle upon Tyne with an exhibition entitled Dialogus. The launch of the third issue in October of the following year featured a film program, Poly Voices, screened in Newcastle. Lungs Project is also the publisher of a poetry anthology by emerging women and non-binary poets of color, New Landscapes Anthology, which was released worldwide in December 2019. In March 2021, the team collaborated with the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company to launch Love Notes, an inter-disciplinary project that offered a print and online digital experience of dance and collective storytelling. Lungs team’s most recent project, Visions of Home, is a collaborative journal of photography and poetry of African and African-diasporic perspectives, which was released in print in November 2021.

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Programme Team

Angela Burdon Author Picture.jpg — Angela Burdon

Angela Wingate-Burdon (she/her) is an independent curator, artist, and activist based in Dayton, OH, US. She holds a Masters Degree in Curating at the University of Sunderland, UK. Taking a broad approach to cultural production, her curatorial interests lie in the social history of art, focusing on the inclusion of marginalized communities and widening participation and engagement programming. In her artistic practice, she uses photography as a tool to examine and expand cultural narratives centering Black identity.

Sheyda Khaymaz Author Picture.jpg — Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz

Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz (they/she) is an artist, writer, poet, and nomadic curator. They hold an MA in Curating from the University of Sunderland, UK, and is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in modern and contemporary art from Northern Africa. Khaymaz’s artistic practice is primarily concerned with the production of knowledge in the everyday and examining the hegemonic imaginaries in culture through a critical epistemological framework. Their current creative writing project explores the overlapping boundaries between the subjugated Other, social space, and historical textual objects.

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