Yve Laris Cohen’s work has been presented and commissioned by The Kitchen, SculptureCenter, Dance Theater Workshop, Company Gallery, Murray Guy, Abrons Arts Center, Recess, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Danspace Project, Thomas Erben Gallery, Performance Space New York, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, in New York; Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard; the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Laris Cohen has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists (2016), a Franklin Furnace Fund Grant (2015), and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award (2011). He has held teaching appointments at The Cooper Union, New York University, and The New School, and co-facilitates Dance and Process at The Kitchen. Laris Cohen graduated with a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.

Rodrigo Bellott is a Bolivian filmmaker, playwright, and producer—and a 2015-2016 Queer|Art|Mentorship alum. His breakout hit Sexual Dependency marked the rebirth of Bolivian cinema as the country’s first official submission for “Best Foreign Language Film” at the 2004 Academy Awards. 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, which is now in post-production and stars Oscar Martinez and Rossy De Palma. Bellott is currently adapting Tu Me Manques for Broadway and is developing a new project at the New Museum.

Kate Bornstein is an author, actor, performance artist, and playwright who has for over thirty years written award-winning books on the subject of nonbinary gender. Both Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook are out in new editions that incorporate 30 years of advances in gender theory and activism since they were first written. Additionally, Kate maintains a career in theater, making her Broadway debut in the summer of 2018, co-starring in the Second Stage Theater’s production of Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men. Kate’s 2006 book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws propelled Kate into an international position of advocacy for marginalized youth. She has earned two citations of honor from the New York City Council. Kate has donated her collected papers to Brown University, where they will be archived and available for research at both the John Hay Library and The Pembroke Center.

Hao Wu is a technology executive-turned-filmmaker who recently directed the documentary feature film People's Republic of Desire. His work takes a raw and human approach to storytelling within an era of evolving online culture and transnationalism. His documentary films have received support from Ford Foundation JustFilms, ITS, Sundance, Tribeca, and international broadcasters. People's Republic of Desire contemplates internet fame and social isolation through a look into China’s culture of competitive live-streaming. The film has gone on to win numerous awards including the Grand Jury Award for documentary film at the 2018 SXSW festival. Wu’s documentary short about his personal journey to build a “modern” family via surrogacy, titled All in My Family, is launching globally on Netflix in May 2019.

Charles Rice-González, born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx, is a writer, long-time community and LGBT activist, co-founder of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance and a Distinguished Lecturer at Hostos Community College - CUNY. He received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. His debut novel Chulito (Magnus Books 2011) has received nearly a dozen awards including a 2013 Stonewall Book Awards - Barbara Gittings Literature Award Honor from the American Library Association and a "Small Press Highlights" mention from the National Book Critics Circle. He co-edited with Charlie Vazquez, From Macho To Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (Tincture/Lethe Press 2011). He is also the chair of the board for The Bronx Council on the Arts and The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures.

Lola Flash uses photography to challenge stereotypes and offer new ways of seeing that transcend and interrogate gender, sexual, and racial norms. Flash works primarily in portraiture with a 4x5 film camera, engaging those who are often deemed invisible. She earned a BA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a MA from the London College of Printing. Flash has received residencies from Light Work, the Art Matters Foundation, and Alice Yard. Flash has work included in important public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Brooklyn Museum. Her work is also featured in the publication Posing Beauty, edited by Deb Willis, currently on exhibit across the US. In 2016, she co-led a talk at the Bronx Museum with Sur Rodney Sur. They spoke to the glaring lack of women artists and artists of color, with respect to the Art AIDS America exhibition. Pen + Brush Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in 2018 featured a 30 year retrospective of her significant photographs.

Maria Bauman-Morales is a NY-based “Bessie” award winning (Outstanding Performance, skeleton architecture) multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer. She creates bold and intimate artworks for her company, 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 living rooms and nightclubs and concert dance classes to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter-dependence. Maria is a 2018-19 UBW Choreographic Center Fellowship Candidate, 2017-19 Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and was the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney Dance. She is also a co-founder of ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), undoing racism in arts fields, and was recently honored with a 2019 BAX Arts in Progress award for that work.

Founder and Curator of the Every Woman Biennial: C. Finley, based in New York City and Rome, is known for her elaborate paintings and intense use of color, monumental murals, multi-disciplinary collaborations, and her activism through urban art interventions, including her acclaimed Wallpapered Dumpsters. As the co-founder and lead curator of the Every Woman Biennial she has exhibited over 500 female and non-binary artists in New York and Los Angeles. Finley has shown internationally with exhibitions at Galerie Ernst Hilger Vienna; Superchief Gallery Los Angeles; Bryant Toth Gallery New York; Context/Art Miami; Scope Miami and New York; FDA project in Rome. Finley received her BFA from the Pratt Institute, New York and her MFA from California State University, Long Beach. Her work has been featured in the The New York Times, La Repubblica, Dazed, Fast Company, Women’s Wear Daily, LALA, and more.

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and a 2019 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. His full-length plays include Flood, The Betterment Society, The Shaking Earth, Draw the Circle (productions: PlayMakers Rep, Mosaic Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre; published: Dramatists Play Service), and Tank & Horse (world premiere at the Berkshire Fringe Festival). Deen’s work has been supported by a number of institutions including Sundance Institute/Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, The Public Theater, NYTW, MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Target Margin Theatre, Keen Company, New Harmony Project, Phoenix Theatre, Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation, Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, InterAct Theatre, Page73, Ma-Yi, and others. He is a member of the NYTW Usual Suspects, Ma-Yi Writers Lab, founding member of the Public Theater Alumni Writers Group, and the Dramatists Guild. He is represented by the Gurman Agency.

Gayatri Gopinath is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke UP, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke UP, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic cultural production in journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, Social Text, and positions.