Rodrigo Bellott was born in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. His breakout film, Sexual Dependencywon over 15 awards in over 65 film festivals around the world and was also Bolivia’s first film competing for “Best Foreign Language Film” at the 2004 Academy Awards.VARIETY magazine named Bellott as one of the “TOP TEN Latin American Talents to Watch”.

Bellott worked with Mentor, filmmaker Silas Howard on the film adaptation of his play Tu Me Manques, that explores contemporary queer identity in the moment of historical change in contrast with the current situations in other parts of the world.

Monstah Black is a multi-disciplinary performing artist and educator and has accumulated numerous awards including the Tom Murrine Performance Award and the BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. He has taught and performed internationally with various dance companies as well as with his own work. He is currently working on a dance film project called “Cotton” sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts.

Monstah worked with Mentor, dancer and choreographer Arthur Aviles on a performance project entitled HYPERBOLIC!.

Wells Chandler is a MFA recipient in painting at the Yale School of Art where he was awarded the Ralph Mayer Prize for proficiency in materials and techniques. With shows nationally and internationally, Chandler’s latest body of work entitled “The Best Little Whore House in Texas” opens this fall at Roberto Paradise Gallery in San Juan, PR.

Chandler worked with Mentor, visual artist Angela Dufresne on a series of crocheted figurative works and resin paintings.

Erin Greenwell wrote and directed the feature film My Best Day, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. Her other directing endeavors include Oh Come On, a punk DIY performance video for Kathleen Hanna’s band The Julie Ruin and The Golden Age of Hustlers, featuring Justin Vivian Bond’s remake of the iconic song written by legendary punk chanteuse Bambi Lake. In 2006, Greenwell formed Smithy Productions, a production company, with the aim of cultivating talents from the queer/independent art community under the umbrella of narrative and documentary storytelling.

Greenwell worked with Mentor, director and screenwriter Stacie Passonto develop her narrative feature length script, The Flight Deck, based on the butch/femme lesbian bar scene in Buffalo, NY during the 1950s.

Doron Langberg was born in Israel, and currently lives and works in Queens, NY. He received his MFA from Yale University and holds a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a Certificate from PAFA. He is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and the Yale Schoelkopf Travel Prize, named as a NYFA Painting Finalist. Langberg’s work was featured in New American Paintings and is in the permanent collection of the PAFA Museum.

Langberg worked with Mentor, visual artist and writer Avram Finkelstein on a series of paintings.

Jacob Matkov writes poetry in Brooklyn, NY where he teaches first year writing and is the coordinator of the English / Creative Writing graduate programs at LIU Brooklyn. He is a co-founding editor of visceral brooklyn and his poems have been published in fields magazine, voicemail poems, Maudlin House, thosethatthis, Downtown Brooklyn and others. He received his BA from Arcadia University and his MA and MFA both at LIU Brooklyn.

Matkov worked with Mentor, author Jaime Manrique on a manuscript of poems examining the experience of trauma.

Mylo Mendez is a Texas-born video artist currently based in Brooklyn. Hir work uses humor, narrative, and characters with aberrant bodies to navigate identity, social and geographical borders, and history. Mendez has been featured in group shows in New York City and Austin. Ze received hir MFA from Parsons The New School for Design.

Mendez worked with Mentor, filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris on a film about the intersection of trans and punk identities and communities in New York City.

Eva Peskin & Justine Williams are interdisciplinary artists, performers and culture producers. Joint project, Nothing to See Here is perfect example of their use of civic multi-media performance engaging audience-participants dystopia (co-created with Vanessa Gilbert). Peskin is a member of ANIMALS Performance Group and teaches critical media literacy with The Learning About Multimedia Project while Williams is working on New Mystical Readers, a series of queer vision quests incorporating Jungian archetype theories, quizzes, collage, and stop-motion video.

Peskin and Williams worked with Mentor, playwright, director and dramaturgTalvin Wilks on a performance that rethinks the oath of the first Boy Scout Handbook, questioning accountability, community service and self development with an ethical lens rooted in queer, feminist and anti-racist thought.

Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator in New York City, whose work focuses on queer politics, culture, and history. He is the Founding Director of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, sits on the Board of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Bennington.

Ryan worked with Mentor, curator Shannon Michael Cane on a forthcoming show of outsider art at La MaMa Galleria.

Brendan Williams-Childs is a short-story writer from Wyoming. His work has appeared on NPR and in Midwestern Gothic Issue Literary Journal. In 2013, he was awarded the Larry Neal Writers’ Award. He co-edits the very small zine and chapbook press Cheap Dates Press.

Williams-Childs worked with Mentor, author Sarah Schulman on an anthology of speculative short stories.