Chris Blue (1993, Washington D.C.) is an American artist whose work focuses on illustrations of human consciousness. He is a member of dggd collective, appears in The Magic Flute, an opera in 6 steps written by Vaginal Davis, and was an artist-in-residence at The Residency at McDonald's. Chris has a BFA in Studio Art from New York University. 

Blue will be working with Mentor, multi-disciplinary artist Kimberly Mayhorn on a forthcoming film regarding Mozart's last universal and transcendental composition.

Anna Campbell is a visual artist who’s work deconstructs otherwise legible signifiers of gender and heteronormativity using sculpture, site-specific installation and the design of ephemera. Campbell’s work is in the collections of numerous universities, the MoMA Library, The Center for Book Arts, and the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Campbell divides her time between New York, where she maintains a studio, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she teaches sculpture, installation and curation as Associate Professor in the Art & Design Department at Grand Valley State University.

Campbell will be working with Mentor, artist/designer Liz Collins on a sculptural series entitled Apparatus for a Dream Sequence,drawing from the alchemy of furniture-adjacent sculptural forms whose curious composition and capacity for material metaphor help to deconstruct our plastic world.

Ashton Cooper is a Brooklyn-based independent writer and curator. She is currently organizing “Read My Lips” — a two-person show of the work of Loren Britton and Kerry Downey — that will open at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens this November. Recent writing projects include an essay for a publication on artist Ellen Cantor to be released by Capricious in late 2016 as well as a catalog essay for Mira Dancy’s exhibition at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. Her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Modern Painters, Hyperallergic, Artinfo.com, Cultured, Art + Auction, Pelican Bomb, ASAP Journal, and Jezebel. She is the director of Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York.

Cooper will be working with Mentor, curator Margaret Ewing on a show about queer abstraction and camouflage, exploring how abstraction, specifically, can function as a form of protection, diversion, or camouflage in image-making and queer representation.

Emily U. Hashimoto is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a VONA/Voices alumna, and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Kalyani Magazine, Bitch Magazine, and Indiewire. She received her BA from Douglass College at Rutgers University and her MS from Pratt Institute.

Hashimoto will be working with Mentor, author Sarah Schulman on her novel about two queer women of color over the course of ten years, following them as they grow away from and towards each other.

Heather Lynn Johnson is a writer, photographer, performance artist and poet, living in New York. Her work is characterized by its lyricism and cultural critique. Through the use of imagery and the written word, Johnson explores being other-ed in a consumerist society by mining the history of gender, sexuality, and the racialized body. Johnson received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA from Columbia College Chicago both in Photography. Her work has been exhibited nationally and most recently at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture's exhibition of Ntozake Shange's choreopoem i found god in myself. 

Johnson will be working with Mentor, poet Pamela Sneed on a poetic guide to survival for the black and queer in America utilizing personal dreams, familial history, and life experience to inform the piece.

Jamal T. Lewis is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural worker and writer living in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York, hailing from Atlanta, Georgia. Their work interrogates and explores identity formation, loneliness, ugliness, desire(ability), race, class, gender, and sexuality. They are currently in pre-production for their debut documentary film, No Fats, No Femmes. Jamal is deeply invested in and concerned about creating and archiving stories that complicates and expands Black history, especially those of marginalized communities: poor, trans, gender non-conforming, fat, dis/abled, and various other locators language cannot reach, contain and/or hold. Put simply, Jamal is a Black faggot who won't hush his-her mouth. 

Lewis will be working with Mentor, filmmaker Stephen Winter on a documentary entitled No Fats, No Femmes about desire, body image, and sexual racism. 

Jordan A. Martin is a multi-disciplinary musician, poet, & curator. Her work is often collaborative, participatory, & research-based & employs logics and languages of association, & disembodiment/deferment to reorganize relationships to Pedagogy, Age, Race, Desire, Music, and Information. Her music, work, & workshops have been shown & performed at Columbus Museum of Art, Cooper Union, Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio Poetry Association, Ohio State University, La MaMa Theatre, Dixon Place, Ars Nova, Brooklyn Art Exchange and more.

Martin will be working with Mentor, dancer/choreographer Arthur Aviles on the next episode of Teaching to Transgressions, a performance lecture series, creating obfuscated re-performances of the works of artist, activist, writer, director Lois Weaver.

Rodrigo Moreira is a Brazilian visual artist currently living and working in New York City. His works are focused on communication and social issues. He has taken part in many exhibitions in Colombia, Spain, USA and Brazil, where he received the 66th Salão de Abril de Fortaleza Prize. 

Moreira will be working with Mentor, artist/writer Avram Finkelstein on a project entitled NSA - No Strings Attached, documenting a fictional relationship based on love, fetishism and domination through photography and text.

Christina Quintana (CQ) is a writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. Her chapbook of poetry, THE HEART WANTS, was released from Finishing Line Press this year. She is a proud member of Ensemble Studio Theatre's Obie-winning cohort of playwrights, Youngblood, and the recipient of commissions from Actor’s Express and Peppercorn Theatre, as well as fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation and Columbia University School of the Arts, where she received her MFA in Playwriting. 

Quintana will be working with Mentor, performer/writer Moe Angelos on a novel engaging with the historical narratives of Weeksville, one of America’s first free black communities, and a Dutch settler's romantic relationship with an enslaved man in New Amsterdam (circa 1650) to explore some of the missing stories of same sex love and lust among American slaves.

Virgil B/G Taylor is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. He received a BA in Studio Art and American Studies focusing on printmaking and queer theory from Wesleyan University. He works between text and image, communities and computers. As a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective he works to bring attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis as an ongoing intersectional political reality through asking questions and designing paper crafts. He runs http://fag.tips/, a speculative zine.

Taylor will be working with Mentor, artist Carrie Yamaoka on a series of online publications examining the history of HIV/AIDS alongside that of the internet from the perspective of a generation born in the early 1990s.