Joel Bergner (aka Joel Artista) is an artist, educator and the CEO and Co-founder of Artolution. Joel has organized community-based public art initiatives with youth in conflict-affected and traumatized communities around the world, from Syrian refugee camps to American prisons; the favelas of Brazil to an orphanage in South Africa. His elaborate, large-scale murals weave smoothly between realism with an urban art sensibility and the raw expressions of children, who learn to tell their stories through collaborative art-making. Through Artolution, he trains and supports local artists in vulnerable communities to lead their own arts-based youth programs, affecting the lives of thousands of children each year.

Beyond his art, Joel has a background as a youth counselor and received his BA in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Over the past 12 years, as he led mural projects in 30 countries across six continents, Joel developed his unique combination of community work and mural art in partnership with dozens of institutions and community groups. His projects have addressed issues including the Rohingya and South Sudanese refugee crises, mass incarceration in the US, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the plight of street youth, gaining attention from international media outlets like CNN, Al Jazeera and Reuters. Joel has a passion for connecting and sharing with people through collaborative art-making. His work can be seen at joelartista.com.

Artolution is a community-based public art organization that seeks to ignite positive social change through collaborative art making. We facilitate projects around the world that connect diverse peoples in order to address common social objectives. Our projects bring together children, families, local artists and community groups. Our main objective is to address critical issues related to armed conflict, trauma and social marginalization by cultivating sustainable global initiatives that promote reconciliation, healing and resilience. Our Artolution teams, made up of local teaching artists, are leading arts programs with youth year-round in refugee camps and vulnerable communities in Jordan, Uganda, Bangladesh, Colombia, the United States and beyond.

We utilize visual public art mediums such as mural art and community sculpture, as well as performance genres like dance and theatre. In our workshops, participants address various community issues and collectively decide on the subject and content, culminating in the collaborative creation of works of public art. Through this process, we emphasize the building of positive relationships among participants, communicative skill-building, the sharing of knowledge and the encouragement of community activism. Our programs are made possible through partnerships with humanitarian agencies like UNICEF, UNHCR, GIZ and others. www.artolution.org