Seyi Adebanjo, is a Queer, gender-non-conforming, Nigerian artist living in the South Bronx. As a media artist Seyi raises awareness around social issues through digital video, multimedia photography and writings. Seyi’s work is the intersection of art, media, imagination, ritual and politics. Seyi has been an accomplished artist, performing with Sharon Bridgforth and performing at the Walker Art Center. Seyi’s work has recently been screened at the Bronx Documentary Center and the Sydney Transgender International Film Festival. Seyi has been a Project Involve Fellow and City Lore Documentary Institute scholarship recipient. Seyi is currently artist in residence with Allgo working on The Orita Project, an international film and performance endeavor.

Adebanjo worked with Mentor, documentary filmmaker Yoruba Richen on a film experimenting with ritual, the erotic and gender through the Yorùbá religion as both a culture and spiritual practice.

Ella Boureau (director) is an NYC-based writer, editor, events curator and is currently the Awards Coordinator for the Lambda Literary Foundation. She is a 2013 Queer / Art / Mentorship alum, and founded and ran the online magazine and reading series In the Flesh for several years, an exploration of queerness as a desire for knowledge wedded to the erotic. Her writing has been featured in Guernica, Tin House, Slice Magazine, The Rumpus, and Full Stop, and her first play, Helps to Hate You a Little: A Lovestory, debuted at Cloud City in November 2016. She is currently at work on a second play called Province 49: or The Wolf, Once a Stunning Girl-Child.

Boureau worked on a play entitled Helps to Hate you a Little with Mentor, actor and playwright Moe Angelos.

Bridget de Gersigny, is a South African visual artist based in Brooklyn, working primarily in video, installation, and sound. Having grown up under apartheid and experiencing the ripping shift from oppression to democracy in her teens, made her super aware of the space between impassioned belief and error. A place where fundamental ideologies collided. She creates interactive multimedia installations, bringing to consciousness aspects of those things, like looking at very long histories or different ways of relations of how things exist and shape our perceptions. Her work engages in the intersection of the queer community and other communities. Bridget is a 2013 ICP-Bard MFA graduate and holds a BA (Hons) degree from the University of Cape Town, in Psychology and Literature, and Art from University of South Africa.

Gersigny worked with Mentor, visual artist Carlos Motta, on a project that explores queer history and cultural difference in Brooklyn.

Nicole Goodwin, was the recipient of City’s College’s The Riggs Gold Medal Essay Award for 2011 and finalist for the Poets House’s 2013 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship Program and a fellow of the North Country Institute and Retreat for Writers of Color. She is the former editor of the Escriba/Write, winner of the 2006 CCHA Eastern Region Small Journal Award. A single mother, she earned her Bachelor’s of Arts in English and Anthropology from City College of New York in June of 2011. Recently, she published an article “Talking with My Daughter…” for the New York Times Parents Blog,and will be featured in the upcoming documentary film “Tough Love.”

Goodwin worked with Mentor, writer Jaime Manrique on a poetic project exploring gender and race identity and homeless LGBTQ youth.

Rick Herron, is a curator, artist, writer and museum worker from Plattsburg, MO. He has participated in projects with Visual AIDS, Elmgreen & Dragset, Michael Alan Alien, palissimo, Dis Magazine, and many others. He recently curated queer performance for The LGBT Center at the Ideas City festival including artists such as Buzz Slutzky, Ann Liv Young, Becca Blackwell and Dandy Darkly. Since 2007 he has worked at the New Museum where he is Assistant Manager of Visitor Services.

Herron worked with Mentor, curator Pati Hertling, on an exhibition about the legacy of Keith Haring for the Spirit Museum in Stockholm.

Peter Knegt, is a writer, filmmaker and blogger born and raised in Ontario, Canada. He was worked primarily and extensively as a film journalist, most notably for New York-based online magazine Indiewire, where he’s worked since 2006 and currently serves as their Senior Writer. His first book, About Canada: Queer Rights — a historical account of LGBT activism in Canada — was released in 2011. He is also the co-founder and artistic director of Picton Picturefest, a film festival for youth in rural Canada, and recently completed work on his first short film, “Good Morning.”

Knegt worked with Mentor, actor, novelist, and playwright James Lecesne on a literary work based on his experience at “The Pilgrimage”, a portable-film-festival odyssey in the Scottish Highlands organized by Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins.

Natalia Leite, is an artist and filmmaker, born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She began her career showcasing art films in galleries in Sao Paulo and San Francisco. Since moving to New York in 2006, she has directed music videos, docs, and short films which have screened in numerous festivals internationally. She is currently working on her first feature film, Bare, produced by Derrick Tseng (Prince Avalanche, Party Monster), Alexandra Roxo, and Dahlia Heyman. She is also co-directing a documentary called Shooting Serrano, produced by VICE, the comedy web series, Be Here Nowish, and a pilot for a VICE Series called Every Woman. She is a recipient of the Kodak Student Grant Award and a Sundance Screenwriters Lab Finalist. Her work can be seen on: www.gotpurplemilk.com.

Leite worked with Mentor, narrative filmmaker Rose Troche on her first feature length film about a young woman living life to the fullest in Nevada.

Troy Michie, is a visual artist who was born and raised in Southwest Texas. Utilizing the methodologies of collage and assemblage, he investigates the boundaries between race and sexuality. His work has been exhibited at Anna Kustera Gallery, The Stedelijk Museum s-Hertogenbosch, and will be included in “Outside the Lines” an upcoming group exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at El Paso and his MFA from Yale School of Art.

Michie worked with Mentor, visual artist Geoff Chadsey on a series of sculptures and mixed media works inspired by Jean Genet’s Querelle of Brest.

Colin Self, composes and choreographs new trajectories for Global Queer Consciousness. His performances explore aesthetic temperament between vocality, violence, popular culture, and sincerity. Spanning a transdisciplinary lifestyle, Colin seeks to embellish diverse cultures with queer presence and develop a highly stylized language of transnational communication. Through his performance work, community organization, and personal life, Colin exhibits the power and beauty of feminized identities as a constant praxes of collective resistance.

Lain Kay, is a cross disciplinary artist focused in the mystique of identity branding. Graduate of California College of the Arts with a BFA in Painting and Drawing, his senior work portrays multiples of himself acting out appropriated cliches within art history and nationalistic propaganda. Indicative of a tounge-and-cheek punk attitude; these aesthetics inform and modify more recent performance works. Through mostly collaborative, music driven projects, Lain Kay positions himself as faux pop star with a tabloid tragicness. This playful hypocrisy of ethics invites commodification, but intends to perform a mockery of class values in our culture, and the timelessness of power and spectacle.

Self and Kay worked as a collaborative pair on a multimedia installation and performance on gendered pop culture and consumerism with Mentor, Big Art Group founder Caden Manson.

Xeňa Stanislavovna Semjonová, is a poet, artist, and translator originally from Slovakia, now living in NYC. Xeňa has performed in venues such as the Poetry Project, Dixon Place, Interstate Projects, Bowery Poetry Club, Michelle Tea’s RADAR, Panpoly Performance Laboratory, SPECTRUM NYC, Strange Maine, the Lynn Redgrave Theater, Page 22 Poetry Parlor, Happy Endings, GRRRLS on FILM, the Leslie Lohman Gallery, and many others. She is a Poets House 2013 Fellow; and is the Editor of What Now, an audio anthology of poetry. Her project SHE is upcoming as both a book and a performance in 2014.

Semjonová worked on writings focused on trans voice and experience with Mentor, performance artist and musician Geo Wyeth.