agustine zegers (Visual Art)
agustine zegers (they/them) is a Chilean artist, writer, and bacterial community dedicated to the worlds of olfaction and symbiosis. Their work uses text, olfaction, and ritual in an attempt to comprehend and commune with flows of ecological collapse as well to question the pervasive systems that produce them. Their work has been exhibited at Critical Distance in Canada, Galería Metropolitana in Chile, and the Sharjah Art Foundation in the UAE. Their work has been published by the Institute of Queer Ecology, the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, DIS Magazine, and Genderfail Press.
Anh Vo (Performance)
Anh Vo (they/them) is a Vietnamese dancer, writer, teacher, and activist. They create dances and produce texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. Anh comes from a formal theoretical background, studying Performance Studies at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Nevertheless, they artificially try to keep their artistic practice separate from their critical textual endeavors. Their previous work, BABYLIFT, attempted to conjure the ghosts of the Vietnam War, premiering at Target Margin Theater to no audience. Recently, Zoom gathering has allowed Anh to teach/introduce experimental performance to young adults in Vietnam, which has been a challenging and rewarding process.
Antonius-Tin Bui (Visual Art)
Antonius-Tin Bui (they/them) is a shapeshifter whose artistic practice is non-binary as their own identity. They play in the realms of hand-cut paper, community engagement, performance, and soft sculpture to visualize hybrid identities and histories that confront the unsettling present. Their ever-changing queer, genderfluid, Vietnamese-American experience informs the way they employ beauty as a refuge for fellow marginalized communities. Bui’s honors include fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, Kala Art Institute, Halcyon Arts Lab, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and Yaddo.
Clarissa Brooks (Literature)
Clarissa Brooks (she/her) is a black queer writer, journalist, and cultural worker. Proudly born in Charlotte, NC, Clarissa has been based in Atlanta, GA for the last five years. She is a proud black southerner and will argue with anyone about the cultural importance of Bojangles any day. She is a community organizer of 6+ years. Clarissa uses a black queer feminist lens to approach her cultural criticism and investigative reporting. She often writes about hip-hop, HBCUs, black political power, and the varying cruel conditions of black women and girls survive every day. Clarissa has written for Rolling Stone, Harpers Bazaar, Teen Vogue, NPR, The Oxford American, and Paper Magazine to name a few. She is a former member of BYP100 and the current program director at Just Media. She is a 2018 graduate of Spelman College.
Frances Arpaia (Film)
Frances Arpaia (she/her) is a queer trans woman who lives in Brooklyn. She sort of has a masters degree in Screen Studies from Brooklyn College and occasionally works as researcher, recently on the documentary Disclosure. Most of the time she is busy making her own films which explore everything from queer life in Brooklyn and the struggles of community and connection, to longform works including experimental performance pieces and video-art shitposts. Apparently people even watch them.
JL Akagi (Literature)
JL Akagi (she/her) is a Japanese American writer who writes about what scares her. Her experimental writing seeks to blend elements of Japanese folklore and narrative structures into Western genres. She is particularly interested in queer possibility and the ways that radical, joyful queerness can provide antidotes for suffering. She received her MA from University of Colorado, and her MFA from the New School. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons.
Joie Lou Shakur (Film)
Joie Lou Shakur (they/them) is a Black Trans immigrant from Jamaica. They are a Southern storyteller, medicine maker, and village organizer living in rural NC. Joie Lou (@joieloushakur) is the founding director of House of Pentacles, a Film Fellowship Program and Production House focused on cultural organizing and narrative power led by and for Black Trans and Gender Non-Conforming people. In addition to their work with House of P, Joie Lou facilitates healing circles for Black folks at the intersection of sexual trauma and racial violence. When they’re not building Black futures, Black Trans possibilities, or behind a camera, you can find Joie Lou playing in soil or clay, practicing for karaoke, or cooking traditional Jamaican Sunday dinners on a Tuesday afternoon.
jose esteban abad (Performance)
jose esteban abad (they/them) is an Afro-Carribean Filipinx multidisciplinary choreographer, DJ, and curator based in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory (San Francisco). Their work explores the complexities of identity at the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, race, and geography. Rooted in collaboration and improvisation as tools of resistance and liberation, abad’s work centers QTBIPOC experimental collective process-based practices of becoming and remembering to highlight the most intelligent technologies that exist in this world - our bodies, ancestral wisdom, and nature. They have held residencies and produced work with CounterPulse, the Joe Goode Annex, Paul Dresher Studio, Highways Performance Space, and Hope Mohr Dance; They have also performed and taught nationally and internationally in the Philippines, Mexico, and Europe.
Kei Kaimana (Literature)
Kei Kaimana (they/them) is a disabled nonbinarytrans writer, independent scholar, and artist of Kanaka Maoli and Black descent. They work across form, building stories for BIPOC futures in which our multidimensionality is central and we are well. Kei lives in a sickening body on stolen land, where their solo practice is punctuated by virtual workshops, meetups, and hangouts. Kei has been a fellow at Pink Door (2016, 2019), Fortify Detroit (2018), Open Mouth (2019), and In Surreal Life (2021), and an inaugural virtual artist resident for Situated Critical Race and Media (SCRAM) Collective in 2020. Their writing is published or forthcoming in Foglifter, DSQ: Disability Studies Quarterly, ENTROPY, Feminist Studies, and elsewhere.
Mariam Based (Performance)
Mariam Bazeed (they/them) is an Egyptian immigrant, writer, spoken word artist, performance artist, stage actor, and cook living in Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists, their work across genres has been published in print and online, and their plays have been performed in festivals in the United States and abroad. Mariam is currently at work on a book-length erasure of The Arab Mind, written by the accomplished racist Raphael Patai; The Sunshine School Songbook, a solo cabaret sponsored by late-stage capitalism and the algorithms of Gulf Labor dystopias; and on the second draft of their so-faggy-it’s-in-the-title! play, faggy faafi Cairo boy.
Utē Petit (Visual Art)
Utē Petit (they/them) is an artist, transit, geography, and plant nerd. They work ancestrally inheriting their grandmother’s roles as quilters, and farmers. Having returned to New Orleans and Mississippi they continue to explore how these interests can mesh together. They have shown at Loyal Gallery (Stockholm, SE), The New Orleans African American Museum of Art, and Library Street Collective (Detroit, MI). Currently they are developing plans for a regional transit cooperative: Kindred Airways, Rural Railways, & Trailways.
Xoài Pham (Film)
Xoài Pham (she/her) is a Vietnamese trans woman descended from a long legacy of warriors, healers, and shamans. Her family arrived in California as refugees after the United States pillaged Southeast Asia. Her life’s work is in dreaming new futures where we are all limitless, and she makes those dreams a reality through storytelling. She is currently the Digital Program Managar of Transgender Law Center, Trans Subject Editor of Autostraddle, and National Communications Strategist with Mekong NYC and the Southeast Asian Freedom Network. Her work has appeared in POETRY, the Offing, Teen Vogue, Esquire, and Harper's Bazaar, among others.