Issa is a visual artist, author, musician and filmmaker born and raised in Queens, New York. He has exhibited at numerous galleries and non-profit spaces in the greater New York area as well as at the NYC Outsider Art Fair, in addition to group shows in the Netherlands and South Korea. He has also been featured on German Public Television, in the 1999 HBO documentary The Living Museum by Academy Award-winning director Jessica Yu, and in the 2015 documentary That Which Is Possible. Issa’s memoir The Hospital Always Wins, published by Chicago Review Press in 2016, has the distinction of being the first work published by an African American and written from behind the walls of a mental institution. Issa was the subject of an hour-long NPR audio story that won the 2014 Edward R. Murrow Award for Best News Documentary and the 2014 Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Director’s Choice Award. He is also the recipient of a 1996 Individual Artist Grant from the New York State/Queens Council on the Arts. As a 30-year artist-in-residence at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center’s Living Museum, Issa hopes his remarkable story of resilience and survival can make a difference and create a compassionate understanding of our relationship to the gift and curse of mental illness, drug abuse, art, and the art of living. Artist website: https://www.issaibrahim.net/