Annisia Martinez
is an artist and educator raised in Queens, NY. After graduating from Pratt Institute, she spent three years teaching Visual Arts to middle school students in the Bronx. During this time she worked on large scale oil paintings in her apartment bedroom, and published poems through a virtual residency with Arts Letter and Numbers. In 2021, she led relief printing workshops at the residency Córtex Frontal in Arraiolos, Portugal. She is currently an Education and Engagement Fellow at the Museum of the City of New York, as well as a Teaching Artist at Queens Museum. She is currently working on a series of oil paintings of sheet music (the songs that moved me).
Laura Blacklow
her handmade, manipulated photographic prints and unique artist’s books have been
shown internationally. She is the author of New Dimensions in Photo Processes: A Step-by-Step
Manual for Alternative Techniques, 5th edition (Routledge, NY and London, 2018), published in
French by Editions Francaise un department d’Edi8, Paris, as Procédes de Photographie Alternatifs,
2020.
Her handmade books and prints are in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University;
Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art; and the private collections of Lucy Lippard and Sol Lewitt to name a few. Reproductions of her work have appeared in dozens of publications including Cyanotype: The Blueprint in Contemporary Practice, Christine Anderson (Focal Press, 2019).
Blacklow has been volunteering in Central America for over two decades at FotokidsOriginal. She
was president of the local Artists’ Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America and was an active member of the Boston Area Guatemala Solidarity Committee. Blacklow served on the Board of Directors of Boston’s Photographic Resource Center.
Wes Rodriguez
is a Florida-grown, Cuban-Guatemalan American writer, director, and cinematographer based in Los Angeles, CA. As a first-generation, bilingual, multi-disciplinary artist, his work explores themes of love, identity, metaphysics, and spirituality in science fiction and comedy with a focus on healing generational trauma through laughter and self-reflection. Under the mentorship of Werner Herzog, Wes directed Pa’lante, an award-winning short film shot on location in Cuba. He is a GFS LA Frieze Award Fellow, Hola Mexico Tomorrow’s Filmmaker’s Today Fellow, DGA John Frankenheimer Fellow, and a NALIP Latino Media Market TV Writing Fellow. He earned his MFA in Film and Television Production at USC. Formerly, Wes was a film mentor and educator for the Latino Film Institute’s Youth Cinema Project under Edward James Olmos.
Emily Zadoretzky
is an eco-conscious sustainable artist, designer and writer interested in examining themes of deep ecology, kinship, and the interconnectedness of humans with each other and with all other beings of this earth.Her practice is an exploration and a meditation centered around the possibilities of working with respectfully gathered, plant-based materials, often through a circular system of sowing, growing, harvesting, and hand processing plants as pigments and fibers for use in a variety of forms and applications.Through her practice and process, Emily investigates spiritual and philosophical curiosities, psychic landscapes and liminal spaces, and how physical and conceptual boundaries simultaneously unify and separate people, cultures, and environments.
Kiara Aileen Machado
Kiara Aileen Machado is a contemporary artist born in Lynwood who depicts and explores the construction of identity, femininity, and culture in her work. Her work centers around the importance and complexities of intersecting identities due to migration and forced displacement. She identifies as Central American, as her mother is from Guatemala, her father is from El Salvador and her great grandmother was from Honduras. Through this cultural framework, her work brings into question the absence and exclusion of Central American folx from mainstream u.s. and Latin(x)(e) narratives. Fueled by frustration due to the lack of inclusion and microaggressions caused by white institutions, she is proud to be able to create paintings that serve as documentation of the diaspora that go beyond their [Central American] trauma. Despite all the atrocities they have and continue to endure, she wants to express the beauty of the culture and the continuing resilience and will to survive and thrive.
She obtained her bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing from California State University Long Beach. Her artwork has been seen in museums and galleries across the united states and has begun to show internationally including, Florence, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and San Salvador.
Jenny Wechter
is a blues-folk musician devoted to earth healing. Born and raised in the borderlands of El Paso, TX, Jenny’s compositions explore identity, interconnection, and existential meaning. Jenny’s ongoing work in climate and food justice informs her art and activism. From songs about the hands who sew the garments on our bodies, to remembering the seasonality of fruit, to cherishing the simple things in life, Jenny’s lyrics inspire deep contemplation, gratitude, and devotion. She hopes her songs uplift listeners to remember what’s important, commit to the path of healing and connective coexistence, and find joy in our dancing, loving bodies in time.
Teddy Stjarne
is a multidisciplinary artist primarily working with sculpture, illustration, and printmaking. Transitioning from being a hobbyist for decades, he made a deliberate choice to dedicate substantial time to his art, valuing creativity as seriously as any other profession.
His focus lies in elevating the ordinary into whimsical expressions, advocating for curiosity and play as daily rituals. His art invites interaction and participation, intentionally blurring the boundaries between art and craft, turning the mundane into something magical.
Jes Young
is a non-binary educator and mixed media sculpture artist based in Toronto. Their practice investigates alternative uses of space inspired by infestations and repetitive natural patterns. They practice fluidity within all things.
Young received their Masters of Fine Arts, Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours, and Bachelor of Education from York University. They have held a guest artist position at York University and exhibited work in and around Toronto such as Something Creative’s Bi Bi Baby Showcases (2022), Nuit Blanche Toronto (2022) with East End Arts’ ‘In View’, The Artist Project Toronto (2023), and The Gladstone House Artist Residency (2023). Alongside continuing to develop their artistic practice they are currently working as a Fabricator for local Toronto artists such as Cybele Young and Erin Vincent.
Isaac Diaz
Uoqaus - an adaptation of the Finnish word “huokaus”, meaning to sigh.
Here, the relationship between ceramics and people is explored. Both are uneven and imperfect, yet made of earth. While looking to these connections, uoqaus also reinterprets ancient stories and traditions. Uoqaus mostly finds inspiration through the old, and alive, cultures of Latin America. Uoqaus is a sigh of what can be, a desire for something else while creating that “something else.”
Uoqaus was started in 2019 by Isaac Diaz. Isaac currently lives and works in Oklahoma City.
Rebecca Lejić-Tiernan
is a lens-based artist currently residing in Los Angeles, CA.
She is a Serbian-Irish immigrant whose work explores the challenges of identity formation in our modern, often contradictory world. Her work regularly focuses on the effect identity has on perception, the recursive female gaze, cognitive dissonance and its social implications, and the remembrance of our natural world. Her installations and photography series have been shortlisted for the 2022 Aesthetica Art Prize and the 2022 Sunny Art Prize. Her film works have been exhibited internationally at Cannes Film Festival with Straight8, Altered Images Festival, US Super8 and Digital Video Festival, Back_Up Film Festival, and Moscow Shorts, among others.
Andrea Reed-Leal
is an interdisciplinary researcher and ceramic artist/designer. Her research engages subjects such as the history of the book, female intellectuality, circulation of ideas, and diverse textual technologies, such as ceramics, codices, stone, and codices, in the context of early colonial Latin America. Working on the intersection between different times and geographies, she seeks to assess the repercussions of knowledge of the past and archive-building on the contemporary imaginary. Her current scholarly project investigates the representation of Nahua women and Aztec goddesses in the colonial archive.
Miranda Vitello
is an artist based in Cambridge, MA who creates fun and lively depictions of landscapes, birds, flowers, dancers, and other subjects she enjoys. She works in a variety of mediums including oil, watercolor, gouache, and pastel. While she has taken several drawing and painting classes as an adult, she is mainly self-taught. She has degrees in art history and museum studies and love to travel to new places in search of inspiration. Her work has been exhibited at numerous galleries in New England.
Michelle Garcia
is a Los Angeles, California native, and has explored a plethora ofart mediums from an adolescent age under the guidance of her immigrant parents. As a child,she cultivated a personal relationship with learning through art and performance. She has dedicated her approach to life through the lens of interdisciplinary agencies. She presently hastapped into textile manipulation and mixed media as an outlet to convey her ancestral story. Her adulthood has brought a yearning to memorialize her lineage through a personal collection ofartworks, with the intent to find community through her storytelling.
Luke McDonald
is an emerging artist and teacher who primarily works with fine line pen drawings but has also worked with oil paints and woodcut printmaking. He completed a Bachelors of Visual Arts and Design in 2013 at the Australian Catholic University and is currently completing a Masters of Teaching (Secondary) at the University of New South Wales, specialising in Visual Arts teaching. His artwork The Kiss won the People’s Choice Award at the artSpacific exhibition in British Columbia, Canada and other artworks have also featured in art shows in Sydney. Luke has an interest in exploring traditional styles of artmaking and using them to capture the distinct qualities of foreign landscapes, cultures and people.
Nina Marlene Kraus
is an art historian and curator based in Berlin. She holds an MA in art history, having studied in Berlin, Kraków (Poland) and Santa Cruz, CA.
Her current research focusses on the narratives of feminist art history, artistic utopias as political strategies as well as institutional critique. During her latest work for the three municipal galleries Neukölln in Berlin, she curated exhibitions at Galerie im Körnerpark and Galerie im Saalbau and organized a festival as part of DRAUSSENSTADT at Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch.
Andrea Stokes
is an abstract painter, interested in the language and sensation of colour in imagined and real landscape. She holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Marianna Madriz
is an illustrator originally from Venezuela currently based in London, UK. Her work is characterised for its focus on colourful characters, inspired on daily observations and childhood influences. She's worked on many non-fiction books for children, including the biography series "Little Guides to Great Lives" (translated in Spanish by the editorial Blume). Aside from her freelance practice, she also delivers talks and workshops for universities and museums.
Alexa McWhorter
is a California native with an unwavering love for design and film. Growing up in the Bay Area, the rolling hills and lanky oak trees were her first inspirations. With a solid foundation in the fine arts, Al-e graduated UC San Diego with a BA in Visual Arts in 2018. Since graduating she has gained experience in the entertainment industry as a Studio Operations Coordinator at Industrial, Light and Magic, a freelancer in the art department and graphic design work. Most recently she is completing her MFA in design at the American Film Institute. She loves velvet furniture, stray cats and antique wallpaper.
Sophia McWhorter
is from the hills of Northern California. There she found a love for the untouched land and the exploration of different landscapes. She took up photography in her free time. Sophie majored in Strategic Communications and worked at a Safe Shelter where she worked with art as a form of expression of trauma. She now is getting her Masters in Clinical Social Work at Boston University. In her free time she loves getting in touch with creativity and practices drawing, painting, and enjoys spending time in nature doing just about anything. Sophie also ADORES all and any animals.
Molly Hiebert
work is a result of continued discoveries into both her individual psyche and the internal narrative she has created with the world she lives in. The space we occupy at any given moment makes us feel a certain type of way. Good design simply makes us feel good. The way she paints is dictated by her emotions at that given moment as well as the space it will soon occupy. Using soft and neutral tones, Molly aims to create work that feels heavy yet delicate, archaic yet contemporary, often in and out of her control. Using her fingers, found objects and hand tools, she attempts to blur the boundary between the contemporary and the primitive. Through this process, Molly aims to gain a better understanding of what it means to make work in the contemporary age, and deepen her understanding in the design of spaces.
Calli Webb
is a curator and photographer living and working in Los Angeles, CA. With an interest in impermanence and the temporality of interpersonal relationships, she uses the lens to explore memory, love, and loss. Using photo, video, and written word, moments in time are returned to again and again to glean every bit of feeling from them. Time collapses in on itself while the image remains. Calli has also curated shows in Los Angeles, the latest being a mixed media / sculpture show at These Days LA. She is working toward the next, which will hopefully be realized in fall of 2022.
Daniela Monzi
is an elopement and fine art photographer based in Philadelphia, PA. Her work centers around the human experience, our shared existence, and the quest for revealing the truest form of each person that she documents. Her passion for travel has allowed her to explore six continents and over 20 countries through her lens, producing a body of work that spans across urban and natural environments. While her photography journey began as a young child in New York, Daniela honed hercraft more thoroughly at the San Francisco Art Institute, receiving a BFA in Photography in2017. Her work has been publicly exhibited in San Francisco, CA, Denver, CO, and Philadelphia, PA.
Juvana Soliven
is a visual artist and educator from Honolulu, Hawaii. Soliven’s work subverts and utilizes object languages to speak to issues regarding intimacy, labor, trauma, and women’s positionality within the patriarchal system. Soliven holds an MFA in Metalsmithing at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016, a BFA in Sculpture at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2013, and studied Art Restoration and Conservation at Lorenzo de’ Medici International School in Florence, Italy in 2012. Soliven is a Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Chaminade University of Honolulu. Her work is in the collections of Cranbrook Art Museum, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, as well as in private collections. Soliven has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Netherlands, Germany, and Iceland.
Annette Köhn
is a graphic designer and illustrator who founded the very cool looking publishing house Jaja (engl. "Yesyes") based in Berlin, Germany. Jaja strives to offer a platform predominately to young, unknown artists.
Chelsea Smith
is an artist, curator and visual arts facilitator based in Kaw/Kansa Nation/Kansas City, KS. She holds a BA (Honors) in Ceramics from Camberwell College of Arts in London, UK. Past curated exhibitions include The Rim of Morning at Open Windows Cooperative in San Francisco, CA and Not Quite Fatal at Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, MO. Recent group exhibitions include Run, Run, Quiet at Plug Gallery in Kansas City, MO and Temporalis Rite at Beco Gallery in Kansas City, MO. She is the recipient of an Artists Now grant from Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA and a ceramic residency grant at Sanskriti-Kendra in New Delhi, India. She currently facilitates online programming for neurodiverse and disabled artists at NIAD Art Center in Ohlone Territory/Richmond, CA. Additionally, she is a ceramics instructor at Johnson County Arts and Heritage Center in Overland Park, KS.