Krista Dragomer

 As the Vunja Artist-in-Residence, Krista collaborates with The Emergence Network (ten) to create immersive worlds online and in-person that invite the global networks of ten and various situated local communities to participate in sensory explorations of post-activism as practice.

In 2024, this collaboration took the form of Artistic Director of the Becoming Monster Festival.

Becoming Monster: A Convening at the End of the Human, October 30th - November 3rd 2024, was a five-day festival with virtual, hybrid and in-person components hosted by ten and a strange ecology of friends and partners (non-human and human alike). The event brought together over 800 people from around the planet to grieve the losses that come with living into the end-times AND to play with ideas of fabulation, imagination and questioning: what else might the human be in our crumbling, entangled, pulsating, animist world(s)? The event unfolded over Samhain, Halloween, All Souls Day and los Días de los Muertos, in a season associated with porosity between realms, celebrations of reunion between the living and the dead, congress with the underworld and the ancestors. There were nearly 50 experimental, practice-based online sessions offered; daily virtual spaces for integration and metabolization; around 20 in-person gatherings from Bangalore, India.. to Berlin, Germany to Lake Atitlán, Guatemala; and two hybrid offerings of theater and ceremony. 

For a taste of the festival, peek at a clip from the Opening Ceremony (above), listen to the sounds of our collective monster in this sonic collage,  peruse a gallery of visual harvests from our time together (below). To learn more about the event in its entirety, visit the festival website.

“The potent 5-day online / offline festival known as Becoming Monster simply would not have been possible without the leadership, inspiration and direction of Krista Dragomer. She is not only a remarkably talented and prolific visual artist, she is also an exceptional writer and curator of queer and evocative aesthetics. As many people who participated in the event noted, Krista helped envision and bring into being entire Becoming Monster worlds via her multi-media artworks, videos, soundscapes and writing. Those of us at The Emergence Network (ten) have been learning alongside Krista and using her Drawing on the Senses practices to integrate and engage directly with our sense perceptions in an embodied way. She is a true mentor for our organization and the people we collaborate with.” —Aerin Dunford, Director

In 2025, Krista’s role spilled beyond Artistic Director and co-creator. As local host of the Liquid Cartographies festival in Red Hook, Brooklyn…

Liquid Cartographies: Reshaping the Banks of the Possible was an experimental festival created to explore practices of open-ended thinking. We invited a range of people from many disciplines, traditions, and perspectives, to offer participatory propositions that engaged participants in explorations of fluid perspectives.

The invitation was to come together in this place, the Red Hook, Brooklyn waterfront, to think, sense, vocalize, create, move and learn with this land and this water, and to ask: what new modes of sensing, what new capacities might we need to embody, in order to envision possibilities beyond the known?

At 12:50am, September 18th, Krista was woken by a text from Ethan Cornell, who had been working around the clock, putting up wallpaper, framing and installing art, a chandelier, leather chairs and a fireplace for our Disorientation Station, delivering the shocking news that a massive fire had broken out at 481 Van Brunt Street, a historic building full of art studios, including Ethan’s, and small business owners, including NY Printing and Graphics, where all of our maps and tote bags had been printed and ready for pick-up. This is the building that houses BWAC (Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition), which was slated to be the main venue for the festival. BWAC was also hosting the Red Hook Open Studios 10 year anniversary show, happening concurrently, with artworks by Krista included.