meet Our LEADERSHIP
Board Chair
Leslie Barlow is a visual artist, educator, and cultural worker from Minneapolis, MN. Barlow believes art and art making is both healing and liberatory, through the power of representation, witnessing and storytelling. Barlow is a recipient of the 2021 Jerome Hill Fellowship, 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship. Her work can be viewed in collections around Minnesota including at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Weisman Art Museum. Barlow earned her BFA in 2011 from the University of Wisconsin-Stout and her MFA in 2016 from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In addition to her studio practice, Barlow has taught at the University of Minnesota, Metro State University, and Carleton College. Barlow also supports emerging artists at Public Functionary as Director of PF Studios, is a part of the Creatives After Curfew mural collective, and after volunteering for MidWest Mosaic for the past 8 years, is happy to join the board as Board Chair!
Board Secretary
Formerly an opera singer, Chad has spent the last 17+ years in the financial sector, specifically in operations and technology. He is currently a Director and Senior Project and Product Manager with NXT Capital, where he manages the lifecycles of numerous business critical processes and applications. Chad has volunteered with MidWest Mosaic (formerly MidWest Mixed) in various capacities since 2020, including the annual conference in 2021 in which he served the role of technology coordinator for the virtual experience of the conference. In his free time he runs tabletop roleplaying game sessions for friends and family, builds mechanical keyboards, and is an unapologetic AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO).
Co-Founder & Board treasurer
Owen Duckworth (he/him) is an organizational co-founder and board member of MidWest Mosaic and has found immense value, affirmation, and a sense of community through his years of involvement with the organization. He works as the Director of Organizing and Policy at the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability and in his work, he is committed to dismantling racism in systems of housing, public transit, and economic development throughout the Twin Cities Region and beyond. Raised in a multi-racial immigrant family in Milwaukee, WI with one parent from England and the other from the Seychelles Islands (Indian Ocean/Africa), he wrestled with his own sense of place as a mixed-race/multi-racial person in this country and developed a deep interest in how race and power have shaped people and communities. Owen graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He also is a music producer, who goes by the artist name O-D and who has worked with a number of artists locally, nationally, and internationally across genres and mediums. He is a board member of Nexus Community Partners, a 2023 Bush Foundation Fellow, and a Community Advisory Board member of the Mapping Prejudice Project. He lives with his family in North Minneapolis.
co-Founder & Director
Alissa Paris is a mother, teaching and performing artist, and brave space-maker living on the stolen lands of the Anishanaaabeg & Dakhóta peoples (Minneapolis, MN). As co-founder and Executive Director of MidWest Mosaic (formerly MidWest Mixed) she curates brave spaces for other Black, Indigenous, and people of culture who may connect to having mixed heritage to navigate conversations at the intersections of race, culture and privilege. Her focus at MidWest Mosaic is to promote healing through the arts and build community in order to strengthen the ways we fight and move in solidarity within and across our liberation struggles. As a youth worker, dancer, and choreographer, Paris has worked to make dance education accessible at more than thirty parks, schools and community programs since 2005. As an aspiring ‘good ancestor’, Paris has deep roots in the Twin Cities where she plans to continue building her social justice praxis alongside many comrades for years to come.
