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The VLC Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence brings together visionary artists, curators, scholars, technologists, and cultural thinkers for an electrifying series of talks, performances, and live broadcasts that collectively illuminate the many forms intelligence can take.
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Along with a keynote lecture, music, VLC Fellows, and performances, the 2025 VLC Community Dinner invites guests to engage with the mind-gut axis—linking cognition, emotion, and digestion—through a curated multi-sensory, shared meal. The evening becomes both a convivial gathering and a relational exploration of intelligence that extends beyond the brain. More than a meal, the Community Dinner is a catalyst—an experiment in collective thinking and feeling that sets the stage for bold ideas, unexpected connections, and powerful new insights to unfold over the next two years.
This year’s dinner also features tarot and coffee cup readers and other practitioners of traditional forms of divination, inviting reflection on how different cultures have long approached the question of what can be known, intuited, or predicted. Set alongside conversations about AI, algorithms, and technological prediction, these encounters offer playful, poetic, and embodied ways of thinking about intelligence. Set around a long table and open to all, the evening is about connecting with others and letting big ideas simmer. It’s an invitation to enact and embody collective intelligence—with our minds, our bodies, and our appetites. Informal, welcoming, and a little experimental, the VLC Community Dinner nurtures spontaneous conversation and radical hospitality, opening space for new social, philosophical, and somatic inquiries.
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With divination readings by artists Tania Khouri, Jia Sung, and Dannielle Tegeder, and a DJ set by Lamin Fofana.
Sign up here to register your interest in a divination session at the Community Dinner.
Wine is included with the dinner. Please present your ID at the door for a wristband. There is a three drink limit per guest. Outside alcohol is not permitted.
The 2025 VLC Community Dinner is made possible by the support of our dinner co-chairs: Danny Altabef, JK Brown and Eric Diefenbach, Linda Earle, Sarah Brown McLeod, Alan Michelson, and Ellen and Bill Taubman.Â
We are also grateful for the collaboration of our dinner co-hosts: Yona Backer, Howie Chen, Andrea Geyer, Grace Hong, Essye Klempner, Melanie Kress, Elizabeth Larison, Jill Magid, Christian Nyampeta, Robert Sember, Chloe Stagaman, Rachel Valinsky, and Diya Vij.
This event is part of the Vera List Center Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence.
Presented by Vera List Center for Art and Politics at Schools of Public Engagement.
Please let us know if you need any accommodation when registering or by emailing vlc@newschool.edu.
The Theresa Lang Student and Community Center is on the 2nd floor of Arnhold Hall, located at 55 West 13th Street. It is accessible by elevators and there are accessible restrooms on that floor and all gender restrooms on the ground floor.
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The nearest accessible subway stations are the 14 St-Union Sq L, N, Q, R, W and the 14 St/6 Av F, M, uptown only; and the 6th Ave L is fully accessible.
The Vera List Center tries to share its programs as widely as possible, which means recording our programming and making it available on the Vera List Center and The New School websites. By attending the event, you consent to photography, audio recording, video recording and its/their release, publication, or exhibition. You can view past Vera List Center events at veralistcenter.org/events/past.
Tania Khouri is a multimedia artist examining embodied rituals and oral histories. Following familial lineages as a form of reclamation, she is creating a growing multi-media archive that will collect and share ancestral SWANA knowledge of healing, building on community networks of care through a methodology of social practice.Â
Jia Sung is a Singaporean Chinese artist and educator from Minneapolis, MN. Her practice spans painting, artist books, textiles, printmaking, writing, and translation. Drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, Sung uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert conventional archetypes of femininity, queerness, and otherness.Â
Committed to amplifying diverse voices, The New School offers more than a thousand public programs and events each year, providing fresh perspectives and unique learning opportunities. These lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and performances feature prominent and emerging artists, activists, and thought leaders.
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Tania Khouri is a multimedia artist examining embodied rituals and oral histories. Following familial lineages as a form of reclamation, she is creating a growing multi-media archive that will collect and share ancestral SWANA knowledge of healing, building on community networks of care through a methodology of social practice. Khouri holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Parsons School of Design at The New School and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Oklahoma. She was a resident at NARS Satellite Residency in New York City, Urban Theatre Projects (UTP) Care Residency in Sydney, and has been published in Photographer's Forum, Art & Education, TransCultural Exchange's Hello World, and Galerie Magazine online. Khouri is the recipient of the City Artist Corps Grant and a recipient of the 2021 American Australian Association Arts Fund Grant.
Jia Sung is a Singaporean Chinese artist and educator from Minneapolis, MN. Her practice spans painting, artist books, textiles, printmaking, writing, and translation. Drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, Sung uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert conventional archetypes of femininity, queerness, and otherness. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as Wave Hill, the Hessel Museum, and EFA Project Space, has appeared in publications including the Paris Review, the New Yorker, and the Poetry Foundation, and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Special Collections at Yale, Rhode Island school of Design, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Trickster’s Journey, a Chinese mythological tarot deck and guidebook (Running Press 2023), and has taught with organizations like the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York University, and RISD.
Lamin Fofana is an artist and musician currently located in New York City. His music contrasts the reality of our world with what’s beyond, and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation and belonging. Fofana’s overlapping interests in history and the present, and his practice of transmuting text into the affective medium of sound, manifests in multisensory live performances and installations featuring original music compositions, field recordings and archival material. His latest releases include Ballad Air & Fire, Shafts of Sunlight, and The Open Boat. Recent exhibitions include Notes on Planetary Living (2024) at fluent, Santander, Spain and JMW Turner with Lamin Fofana: Dark Waters (2022) at Tate Liverpool, England. Fofana hosts a monthly show on NTS Radio.
Dannielle Tegeder is a visual artist and professor at Lehman College whose work is influenced by architecture and abstraction. Over the past 25 years, she has expanded her practice to include installation, sound, performance, and collaboration. In 2020, Tegeder co-founded feminist artist collective Hilma’s Ghost with artist and educator Sharmistha Ray. Named after Swedish mystic Hilma af Klint, they fuse contemporary art with modern spirituality through divination and ritual and recover feminist histories through artistic production, experimental pedagogy, and community activations. Their work includes paintings, surrealist games, installations, workshops, artist books, and the Abstract Futures Tarot, now in its third edition. In 2022, they launched a roving art school that’s reached over 8,000 people. In 2025, they unveiled a 600-square-foot glass mosaic mural at Grand Central Station, commissioned by MTA Arts & Design. Hilma’s Ghost has been featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, and more.
