J. Bouey is a Dance Artist. They received a BFA in Dance from Arizona State University, and J. is a current performer and collaborator with Christal Brown’s INSPIRIT Dance Company and AntonioBrownDance and performs for Germaul Barnes’ Viwesic Dance. J. Bouey is currently a Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellow for 2018 and BAX Fall Space Grantee. J. was also a Dancing While Black Fellow for 2017-2018, Gibney WorkUp 4.0 Artists in Residence, and has performed with Elisa Monte Dance as an apprentice from 2015 to 2017. J. has shown their original work at Movement Research at Judson Church, Gibney Dance, BAAD!, CPR – Center for Performance Research as a 2017 Chez Bushwick Artist in Residence, La Mama Experimental Theatre and South Mountain Center for Performing Arts.

Bouey worked with performing artist Mentor David Thomson on The Space Between Words, a movement-based project seeking to address the inextricable connections between mental health issues and the toxic teachings of masculinity and patriarchy for Black Mascs in America.

Candystore is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and performer from San Jose, CA. Shimmers writing and art have appeared in Paper Magazine, Riot of Perfume, Phile Magazine, RFD, Mesmer, Hand Job Zine, and others. She-he has performed at Club Cumming, The AC Institute, Situations gallery, LaMama Galleria, Dixon Place, Powrplnt, and every time she-he uses a public restroom. Candystore lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Candystore worked with Mentor, artist and curator C. Finley on a multifarious and performative book-length project about the deep South, queer sex, intimacy, and boundary-making in the digital age that will explore digital space as a kind of haven or safe(r) place to exist.

Daniel Chew is an artist who often works collaboratively, with Micaela Durand in film and Tin Nguyen in fashion, to create and discover queer moments of community. He has a forthcoming performance at the Stedelijk Muesum as CFGNY with Tin Nguyen and has also shown at MoMA PS1, 47 Canal, and White Columns among many other institutions. He is the recipient of a 2014 Rhizome Commission with Micaela Durand and is the Fall 2018 BijlmAIR resident in Amsterdam with Tin Nguyen. He graduated with a BFA in Film and Television from the Tisch School of the Arts in 2010.

Chew worked with Mentor, filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng on a narrative feature about a love triangle that forms between two siblings—brother and sister—and a mysterious stranger. The intimacies that form speak to dynamics of race, sexuality, gender, and privilege as they play out in a technologically saturated world.

Xandra Clark is an actor, writer, creator, documentary performance-maker, and all-around storyteller whose work explores multiplicity, ambiguity, and the struggle to define self and other. Her work has been featured at The Tank, Weeksville Heritage Center, Five Myles, Judson Church, Queer Abstract, Caveat, and Brooklyn College, among others, and been funded by NYSCA/Brooklyn Arts Council, Brooklyn Community Foundation, and Stanford Alumni Arts. She founded and hosts performance series The Green Room and co-created popular podcast True Story. Xandra is a company member of The Bats at The Flea and Poetic Theater Productions, is 2018-19 co-leader of Colt Coeur’s theater education initiative, and received the 2013 General Oliver P. Smith Award for Local Reporting from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. BA Theater, MA Journalism: Stanford University.

Clark worked with Mentor, theater artist and playwright Mashuq Mushtaq Deen on Polylogues, a verbatim interview-based solo show exploring real people’s anonymous experiences with queering the traditional relationship structure through nonmonogamy.

Born in Nova Scotia, Sarah Mihara Creagen is an artist currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She attended university at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax), Concordia (Montreal), and The Ontario College of Art and Design (Toronto), receiving her BFA in 2012. Creagen received her MFA from Hunter College in 2018. She attended the Vermont Studio Center in 2013 on a partial fellowship, and was the recipient of a Kossak Travel grant in 2018 which enabled her to travel to Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Kyoto. She has exhibited work in Toronto and New York.

Creagen worked with Mentor, visual artist Neil Goldberg on expanding a body of drawings and comics that explicitly explores her family’s mixed-race Japanese heritage and investigates areas of representation connected to women’s bodies in sex and sexual health.

Cristóbal Guerra is a writer and filmmaker from San Juan, PR currently based in New York. His work combines experimental video pieces, documentary form and written word to explore ideas of home, memory, "el caribe" and queerness. He was a 2017 Culture Push Fellow, a 2018 Resident at ACRE and has exhibited work with Fuerza Fest, Little Berlin Gallery, NY Immigration Coalition andThird Horizon Caribbean Film Festival.

Guerra will be working with Mentor, writer Charles Rice-González on TropiColonia Studios, a piece that explores the idea of a post-liberation Puerto Rico through the lens of three queer characters in their late 20's.

Russell Perkins makes work across media that aims to understand how economic imperatives register on the individual body. He received an MFA from Hunter College in 2018, where he was The Artist’s Institute’s Lazarus Curatorial Fellow. While at Hunter, he also conducted research in the archives of architect Lina Bo Bardi in São Paulo, Brazil with support from an Evelyn Kranes Kossak Travel Grant. His work is informed by two years studying philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a long term commitment to anti-prison activism as co-founder of Wesleyan University’s Center for Prison Education.

Perkins worked with Mentor, visual artist Nancy Brooks Brody on an installation that interprets the ambient sounds of slot machines and electronic games for a vocal ensemble. This project is part of a larger body of work that hopes to more deeply consider the space between speculation—the voluntary assumption of risk—and precarity as unwilled exposure to neoliberal financial hazards.

Ripley Soprano is an organizer and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. They have been organizing for over a decade around racial and economic justice issues. They co-founded New York 2 New Orleans Coalition (NY2NO), New York Students Rising, Youngist: young people-powered media, and the fundraising collective "Shadowbanned" that materially supports sex workers facing criminalization. They are an editor and co-owner of Mask Magazine, and are currently co-authoring a book on the social history of incest for TigerBee Press alongside Sophia Giovannitti. Ripley has been published in Mask, AlterNet, The Nation Magazine, the New York Times, and Salon.

Soprano worked with Mentor, writer and archivist Che Gossett on a nonfiction critical theory text that engages with the concept and reality of “celebrity” under late racial-capitalism to consider how it perpetuates the social ladder, toxic masculinity behavior, wealth accumulation, and public control of land and the masses.

Natalie Tsui (b. 1985, Hong Kong) is queer artist and filmmaker living and working in Brooklyn, CA. Her work investigates the links and ruptures between mass culture, collective memory, and personal narrative through a conceptual approach to visual storytelling. Tsui received a B.A. in Film Studies and English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008 and an M.F.A. in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 2014. Her work has been screened at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Frameline, Museu de Arts Moderna of Rio de Janiero, Shapeshifters Cinema, Southern Exposure, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was the recipient of the Fotokem Graduate Student Grant and the Princess Grace Film Honorarium, among others. She was a 2018 Flaherty Seminar Fellow.

Tsui worked with Mentor, filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin on if I could turn back time, an exploration of the limits of documentary evidence and the impossibility of recapturing memory through narrative.

Jeanne Vaccaro is a writer and curator. Her book in process, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, explores the felt labor of making identity, and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital / the Andy Warhol Foundation. Jeanne is the curator of Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics, organized for the Cooper Union. She is co-founder of the NYC Trans Oral History Project, a community archive in partnership with the New York Public Library.

Vaccaro was the curator-in-residence during the 2018-2019 Queer|Art|Mentorship cycle and worked closely with Mentor, curator and artist Nelson Santos and Queer|Art staff to organize the 2018-2019 Queer|Art|Mentorship Annual exhibition.