Abby Pucker

Abby is a cultural producer who builds initiatives sitting at the nexus of the creative economy and civic engagement. She is interested in leveraging the collective power and resources of this next generation of wealth and creative talent to find more sustainable solutions to building a just and equitable creative economy. Abby is particularly focused on Chicago and just launched a Chicago-based platform called Gertie. Gertie is a community platform made up of culturally curious young professionals who engage with the city and each other in new ways. Gertie provides membership access to programming in partnership with Chicago’s most exciting institutions, artists and cultural movers & shakers – the ones you know and the ones you should get to know.

To this end, most recently, Abby produced Skin in the Game, a 50 artist exhibition in Chicago's Fulton Market neighborhood in partnership with Jeff Shapack and Alec and Jennifer Litowitz. The second project from the Gertie platform is (A)Part Chicago — a guidebook and cookbook to the city through 26 civic leaders who have helped build the arts and culture ecosystem in Chicago. As Mass Moca’s inaugural Creative Producer in Residence, Abby is working in partnership with Moca’s new Executive Director Kristy Edmunds on a festival in North Adams that aims to show the ways in which the creative economy and artists can work in partnership with local businesses and the community to spur economic development for the city as a whole.

Prior to producing under the Gertie banner, Pucker produced and launched Madison Wells' Chicago-based immersive art experience, Nevermore Park, based on Hebru Brantley's Flyboy. Her film credits include Emily Cohn’s “CRSHD,” which premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and was released in virtual theaters May 2020, “When Jeff Tried to Save the World” starring Maya Erskine, and Erica Rose’s “Girl Talk” which premiered at Outfest in 2018. Additionally, she is a board member of The Marshall Project, Pioneer Works, Ghetto Film School, and the progressive American political organization, Run for Something.

Zoe Lukov

Curator, Emmy-nominated producer, and writer Zoe Lukov develops non-traditional, experimental exhibitions that engage and respond to pressing issues in real time. Previously, as chief curator of Faena Art in Miami Beach and Buenos Aires, Lukov organized the first Faena Festival in 2018, its follow up in 2019, in addition to major solo exhibitions by internationally recognized artists throughout the Faena Districts. She is also a founding board member of Desert X, the nonprofit site-specific exhibition based in California, and recently produced a documentary about Desert X 2021 which premiered at the Getty Museum, aired on PBS, and was featured in the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Riviera International Film Festival and nominated for an Emmy award.

Lukov’s independent curatorial projects such as Fair, an alternative all women non-commercial art fair that took place within a shopping mall, and Holy Water, have been widely lauded in the press and across creative communities. Lukov cut her teeth working with Jeffrey Deitch at MOCA Los Angeles and with Franklin Sirmans on Prospect 3, the New Orleans biennial. She was a 2010/2011 Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and is a graduate of Oberlin College.