Between Self & Society: Identity Through Art

When: March 12, 2026

Where: Virtual, United States

REGISTER

How do we define identity when it is constantly evolving across roles, relationships, and life stages?

Can art help us navigate internal contradictions or social pressures?

Join us for a dynamic conversation exploring identity as fluid and layered—shaped by culture, memory, gender, and community.

Featuring Erin Friedman, AD Herzel, and Teresa Diaz, the discussion centers contemporary female voices navigating the arts and culture industry with resilience and purpose.

MEET OUR GUEST SPEAKERS

Erin Friedman is an abstract artist based in Bethesda, Maryland. Her work emerges from the layered experience of being both an artist and a mother of three young children. Motherhood has profoundly reshaped how she moves through the world—altering her sense of identity, expanding her emotional landscape, and transforming her relationship to time, attention, and care. These shifts surface intuitively in her paintings, where abstraction becomes a space to hold complexity, tenderness, and change.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries and is included in private collections across the United States and internationally. Two of her pieces are currently on view and available for sale in Art4Development.Net’s Resilience and Reverberation exhibition at InterAction.

A.D. Herzel is a Korean American adoptee artist who has exhibited her work over the past twenty years. Working primarily in drawing, she has shown nationally and in Korea. She trained as a painter and printmaker at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and holds an M.Ed. from the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania.

In 2023, she received a Works on Paper Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her work has been recognized by curators from the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kimbell Museum of Fine Arts, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Teresa Diaz is the owner and director of Red Dot Art Gallery, specializing in Mexican and Latin American art, as well as interdisciplinary projects exploring culture, gender, and politics. Born in Mexico City, she studied design in New York and earned a graduate degree in Museum Studies in Washington, D.C., gaining professional experience with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.

Teresa has taught at community colleges, led a study abroad program in Oaxaca, and transformed her gallery there into a vibrant cultural hub, mentoring emerging artists in contemporary expression. Now serving at the Pima Foundation, she advances philanthropy for Pima Community College, bringing together her expertise in arts, education, and community engagement.

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