Carlos Motta’s multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia. Motta’s 20-year career monograph Carlos Motta: History’s Backrooms will be published by SKIRA and distributed by DAP and Thames and Hudson in summer 2020.

Saeed Jones is a writer whose latest memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives, charts a course across the American landscape, drawing readers into the author’s boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each vignette builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves. How We Fight for Our Lives won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the 2020 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award. Jones also wrote the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. He lives in Columbus, Ohio and tweets @TheFerocity.

Jaime Manrique is a bilingual Colombian-born novelist, essayist, translator, and poet. His first volume of poems received Colombia’s National Poetry Award. He’s also published the volumes of poetry My Night with Federico García Lorca and Tarzan, My Body, Christopher Columbus, and his Poemas selectos: El libro de los muertos (2017). He’s the author of the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. His novels include Latin Moon in Manhattan, Twilight at the Equator, Our Lives Are the Rivers, Cervantes Street, and Like this Afternoon Forever (2019). Mr. Manrique’s work has been translated into fifteen languages. Among his honors are a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the Foundation of Performance of the Contemporary Arts, and the International Latino Book Award for Best Historical novel, 2007. He is a former associate professor in the MFA in Writing at Columbia University (2002-2008). Currently, he is a Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at the City College of New York. In 2019, he received the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award from the Publishing Triangle.

Angelo Madsen Minax works in documentary and hybrid filmmaking formats, narrative cinema, experimental and essay film, sound and music performance, text, and media installation. Madsen's projects pull from autoethnography and a DIY ethos to think through chosen and biological kinships, cosmic, natural, and technological phenomena, and his favorite triple goddess: love, sex, and death. His works have screened and/or exhibited at spaces including the European Media Art Festival, Issue Project Room, Kurzfilm Hamburg, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, REDCAT, and film festivals around the world. He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Berlinale Doc Station, and others. Madsen is a recipient of the Samuel Edes Prize for Emerging Artists, the Tribeca Film Institute's All-Access Fellowship, the Sundance Film Institute's Documentary Production Fund, and the Bay Area Video Coalition’s Media-maker Fellowship. He is also an Assistant Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont.

Maria Bauman is a “Bessie” award winning multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is 2020 Columbia College Dance Center Practitioner-in-Residence, 2019 Gibney Dance in Process residency award winner, 2018-20 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, 2017-19 Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and was the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney. In 2009 she founded MBDance which recently premiered (re)Source to sold-out audiences, co-commissioned by the Chocolate Factory Theater and BAAD!. She creates bold and intimate artworks for MBDance, via dream-mapping and nuanced, powerful physicality. Centering non-linear stories, bodies and musings of queer people of color, she draws on her studies of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in nightclubs and concert dance classes to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter-dependence. Bauman is a Core Trainer with The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, helping arts organizations and university dance programs understand and undo racism. In 2014, she co-founded a grassroots organization, Artists Co-creating Real Equity, which won the 2018 BAX Arts and Artists in Progress Award for working to undo racism in our daily lives. Organizing to undo racism informs her artistic work and the two areas are each ropes in a double-dutch that is her holistic practice.

Migration and the permeable concept of home are constant themes in Maia Cruz Palileo’s paintings. Influenced by the oral history of her family’s arrival in the United States from the Philippines, as well as the history between the two countries, Maia infuses these narratives using both memory and imagination. Palileo has participated in residencies at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lower East Side Print Shop, Millay Colony, and the Joan Mitchell Center. They have received an Art Matters Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program Grant, NYFA Painting Fellowship, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, among others. Recent exhibitions include All the While I Thought You Had Received This, Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; Maia Cruz Palileo, Katzen Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Way Back, Taymour Grahne, London; and Meandering Curves of a Creek, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn.

Morgan Bassichis is a comedian and musician who makes solo and collaborative performances that draw on historical archives, collective singing, and something like self-help. Recent shows include Nibbling the Hand that Feeds Me (Whitney Museum, NYC, 2019), Klezmer for Beginners (co-created with Ethan Philbrick, Abrons Arts Center, NYC, 2019), Damned If You Duet (featuring Malik Gaines, Helen Messineo-Pandjiris, Ethan Philbrick, and Mariana Valencia, The Kitchen, NYC, 2018), and The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions: The Musical (co-created with TM Davy, DonChristian Jones, Michi Ilona Osato, & Una Aya Osato, New Museum, NYC, 2017). Their year-long musical improvisation with Ethan Philbrick, March is For Marches, is available from Triple Canopy, and their live recording of More Protest Songs! at St. Mark's Church (featuring Kyle Combs, Elizabeth LoPiccolo, Sam Greenleaf Miller, and Rhys Ziemba) is available online.

Pamela Sneed is a poet, writer, performer, and visual artist, and is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and two chaplets, Gift and Black Panther by Belladonna*. She has been featured in New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Hyperallergic and on the cover of New York Magazine. She serves as faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Low Residency MFA program teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has been a visiting artist at SAIC for four consecutive years. She also teaches at Columbia University's School of Visual Arts, New Genres. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, MCA, The High Line, New Museum and Toronto Biennale. She delivered the closing keynote for the Artists, Designers, Citizens Conference—a North American component of the Venice Biennale at SAIC. She appears in Nikki Giovanni’s “The 100 Best African American Poems.” In 2018, she was nominated for two PushCart Prizes in poetry. She will publish a poetry and prose manuscript Funeral Diva with City Lights in October 2020.

Rodrigo Bellott is a Bolivian filmmaker, playwright, and producer. Bellott’s Who Killed the White Llama? was the most successful box-office hit in Bolivia’s history, leading to Variety magazine naming him one of the Top Ten Latin American talents to watch in 2007. After receiving two masters degrees in screenwriting and directing at Binger Film Lab in Amsterdam in 2011, Bellott founded Bolivian BOLD Inc., a production company in New York City. At Queer|Art|Mentorship, Bellott worked with Mentor, filmmaker Silas Howard on the film adaptation of his play Tu Me Manques. Tu Me Manques, starring Oscar Martiniz and Rossy De Palma, premiered at Los Angeles’ Outfest in summer 2019 and was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best Original Screenplay. The film was also chosen by The Bolivian Filmmakers Association as the country's submission for the 2020 Oscars Best International Feature category.

Tourmaline is an activist, filmmaker, and writer. Her work highlights the capacity of Black queer and trans people and communities to make and transform worlds. In her films, Tourmaline creates dreamlike portraits of people whose stories tell the history of New York City, including gay and trans liberation activists, drag queens, and queer icons Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera (Happy Birthday Marsha, co-directed with Sasha Wortzel, 2018), Miss Major (The Personal Things, 2016), and Egyptt LaBeija (Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, 2017). Recent screenings of Tourmaline’s work have been presented at venues including BFI Flare, London; Seattle Transgender Film Festival; Portland Art Museum; New Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Brooklyn Museum.