Mica is an artist and community organizer living on Kalapuya land in so-called Eugene. Art has always been one of the ways they form a relationship to land and place, and their art usually depicts the plants and animals of the land they’re on or of their ancestral lands in the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa). Their backgrounds in art and ecology and their commitments to a just future have led them to organize around land defense and against imperialism. Using digital illustration, printmaking, and other mixed media, they hope to help kindle fights for liberation.

Indigenous Intermedia artist from the Southwest, embedded into the PNW. My practice is driven by collaboration, ecological solutions via detritus and a hunter-gatherer ethos. I flow through a plethora of mediums. My background as an agriculturalist is woven deeply into my artistic practice. Exploratory endeavors of environment and travel enable my work and relation to other in pursuit of positive change and consciousness. I am building on the elevation of my cultural perspective to evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia that emits joy, contemplation, connection, and inspiration. Land is the mesa from which I push and pull my art from.

Nicole Williford (b. 1994) is a representational painter living in Portland, OR. Since completing her BA in Visual Art at George Fox University in 2016 Williford has been maintaining her creative practice in the Portland area. Williford has been included in regional group shows and has recently made her gallery debut with a solo exhibition at Chefas Projects(Portland, OR). Outside of the studio she works closely with individuals with behavioral challenges, developmental disabilities and memory-loss - this work is highly influential on her painting practice. Williford currently lives and works in SE Portland with her husband and young daughter.

My name is Genevieve and I am a mama and artist from Central Oregon. I am Cherokee, Choctaw and Passamaquoddy and I have been creating art since I could use my hands. For me art is everywhere in nature and I love to celebrate nature in my art. Every year I am alive, I am coming home more and more to myself. I want to spend my time doing what I love in places that bring slowness to my nervous system. The more I practice, the better I am as a human, friend, sister, mama, and auntie and artist.

Valerie Yeo (they/she) is a queer Singaporean artist, writer, organizer, and psychologist. Their art is centered around themes of home, diaspora, spirituality, and identity, and draws inspiration from botanicals, fire, and water. Their work has been previously exhibited through the Oregon Society of Artists, the Regional Arts and Culture Council’s public art program, and Wieden + Kennedy, among others.

Lynn Yarne is a fourth- and fifth-generation Chinese and Japanese American from Portland, OR. She is interested in visual remixing as a process of meaning-making, pulling from mixed metaphor and iconography, stories your auntie’s friend told you, traditions you don’t know where they came from, making it up as you go along, and doing with what you have. Though much of her work has stemmed from a family connection to Portland’s Old Town, her curiosity around community, space, and story extend and expand as they encounter the experiences of other communities and individuals.

LALO is a multidisciplinary artist with roots in Zacatecas, Mexico. Born in Bakersfield, California, based in Portland, Oregon. Their practice centers around ancestral healing that connects them to textures, spaces, and other human experiences that transform into acts of prayer. They explore connections to body, mind, and spirit; honoring these themes helps guide them to a higher sense of self.

nia musiba [knee-uh moo-see-buh] is an ant- loving, asparagus-hating multidisciplinary creative based in Portland, Oregon, with a lifelong commitment to diversifying art and design spaces. Nia is interested in collaboration, experimentation, question-asking, friend-making, and above all else, dreaming big. She views her depictions of Black and Brown bodies as a way to reclaim the tenderness and complexities of her own identity as well as an opportunity to hold space for other people of color who historically have been misrepresented in overly flattened, brutalized, and hypersexualized ways within art and media.

Julie Keefe is a community-based fine artist who utilizes photography, personal narratives, and conversation to create connections that strengthen individuals and communities. Her recent public art projects include Hello Neighbor, Love Letters, Boise Voices, the Ask the Question Project, the Regional Equity Atlas 2.0, Talk to Strangers, and Messages To A President. She frequently collaborates with institutions, youth programs, municipalities and arts organizations to create public art that seeks to engage participants in meaningful dialogue.

Nyingv Jae Saechao is an interdisciplinary artist, community storyteller, and cultural worker. As an intergenerational bridge-builder and artist-apprentice to the ancestors, their work focuses on themes of belonging, culture-keeping, culture-shaping, and ancestral healing with emphasis on fat, queer, Indigenous Khmu and Iu Mien femme and gender-expansive issues. Nyingv Jae is the co-founder of the Cold Rice Collaborative, an ever-evolving creative platform committed to uplifting the narratives and experiences of Iu Mien, Khmu, and diasporic Indigenous/ethnic minority peoples of Southeast Asia. Their practice is guided by their visions of a future that sees our collective communities safe, abundant, and free.

River 瑩瑩 Dandelion walks with his ancestors. He is a practitioner of ancestral medicine through writing, teaching, energy healing, and creating ceremony. Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers, River is the author of remembering (y)our light, a debut chapbook on honoring matriarchs and ancestors across generations. River has received residencies from Headlands Center for the Arts, Can Serrat, Monson Arts, and Tin House. A Lambda Literary fellow and Kundiman fellow, he facilitates creative writing workshops, where participants connect with their own inner and collective power. He loves to swim.

I am a queer Diné creative using filmmaking, music, painting, writing, and photography to document stories, uplift community, and empower marginalized voices. From using vintage rangefinder and film cameras, mirrorless digital cameras, drones, and creativity, I work with clients to thoughtfully finish each project. When not working, I spend time painting, creating soundscapes, hiking/swimming/being in nature, tending the garden, making food, and daydreaming about all the colors in the world I haven't seen yet.

Manal Abu-Shaheen (Beirut/Bronx) is a Lebanese American photographer living and working in the Bronx, NY. Her solo exhibitions include Beirut, Taymour Grahne, London, UK; Mapping Utopia, Blue Sky, Portland, OR; 2d Skin, Soloway, Brooklyn, NY; and Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, NJ. Her work has been included in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA, Aaron Siskind Foundation, and residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts, LMCC, and AIM at the Bronx Museum. Abu-Shaheen holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and MFA from Yale School of Art.

Artist, collaborator, and designer Michelle Vorce found her way to PDX via Alabama where she grew up as a first-generation Brazilian American immigrant. She runs Eclecto Studio, which specializes in working through the hand to create memorable objects and experiences with soul. Through hand-craft and a penchant for paper, her work transforms the mundane and speaks to the power of slow design in today’s oftentimes tumultuous technological age. Her work has been exhibited nationally with features in the Coastal Learning Symposium, Southern Graphics Council International, Imagine Science Films, and the great outdoors.

Susan Kuramoto Moffat is a writer, curator, artist, educator, and urban planner who works at the intersection of landscape, memory, nature, and urban life. As director of Future Histories Lab at UC Berkeley, she taught place-based storytelling to students through collaborations with community organizations. She creates interactive installations in public space and curates multidisciplinary, arts-centered educational programs. She was the founding artistic director of Love the Bulb, a community arts organization based at a shoreline landfill. A former journalist, her work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Boom California, and Estuary News.

Taty Hernandez (they/them) is a Zapotec-American artist, educator, farmer, and cultural worker residing in unceded Tongva Territory (Los Angeles) and Santiago Matatlán, Oaxaca. Their ceramic sculptures and performance center on themes of Indigenous futurism, the quotidian as high tech, collective knowledge production, queerness, and memory. After rematriating to Oaxaca in 2020, they learned Zapotec farming, plant medicine, and oral history technologies from their elders. Hernandez frames clay- and earth-based mediums as technologies that hold ancestral memories. These memory technologies are the tools they use to dream up queer Indigenous futures and are the core principles in their art and social practice.

Sam graduated from the University of Virginia, where they studied architecture and anthropology. With a deep interest in stories told by both people and the land, their design and exhibited work shifted toward a focus on healing spaces. They primarily explore healing through the lens of reconnecting to the land, other people, and oneself. Sam has worked on small organic farms, a landscape architecture firm, as a teaching artist at a nonprofit, and as a studio assistant, where they worked with and creatively supported artists of all ages.

Sunset Suh is a queer Korean American painter, currently based in Portland, OR. Suh was born and raised by their grandparents in the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansas, attending the Kansas City Art Institute and finishing their BFA in painting from the Pacific NW College of Art. Suh’s work examines conditioned culture: a flowery visual gateway leading to truth, queerness, and the comedy of identity. Allegorical moments of time and space are found in their work; intimate platforms of vulnerability resistant to assumed ideologies. Their studio practice channels hidden sensibilities via somatic interplay, a methodology to tinker our internal compass.

Johnny Huy Nguyễn is a Vietnamese multidisciplinary dance artist based in unceded Ramaytush-Ohlone territory (SF). He weaves together movement, theater, media, spoken word, ritual, and installation to create physical works that investigate masculinity, lineage, and intergenerational trauma through a healing lens. Nguyễn is a 2023 United States of Asian America Festival Featured Artist, 2022 Isadora Duncan Dance Award recipient, and 2021 APAture Festival Featured Artist. His work has been presented by API Cultural Center, 500 Capp Street, and Asian Art Museum. His dance films have shown nationally and internationally - Contact Dance International Film Festival (Canada), Dance Camera Istanbul (Turkey).

Alicia Goodwin is a contemporary jeweler based in Chicago, renowned for her expertise in creating sculptural jewelry with striking textures. A graduate of New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology, Alicia adeptly incorporates ancient techniques like reticulation and acid etching into her contemporary designs. Driven by a deep passion for the artistry of complex ancient ceremonial jewelry, Alicia draws inspiration from the ingenuity of artisans who crafted masterpieces centuries before her, using minimal tools like fire, sand, and beeswax.

Muffie Delgado Connelly (she/her) is a Xicanx mother dance artist, movement researcher, and teacher. She is an artist/activist who believes in dance as a strategy for fostering resilience and resistance. Her mission is to make dance engage in somatic practices that address personal and community needs. Her work as a performer and choreographer has been presented in venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, Movement Research Festival (NY), The Gibney Dance Center (NY), Portland Center Stage, Performance Works NW, and Spotlight: USA in Bulgaria. She is the recipient of awards from the Ford Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, and RACC (Portland).

Jordan Jackson-McCoy & Danielle McCoy-Jackson: Jordan (he/him) and Danielle (she/her) are a creative duo representing the African-American and West Indian branches of the African Diaspora. Through their joint practice, Amen, Amen. Studio, they utilize graphic design, apparel & textile design, printmaking techniques and other methods from their cultural backgrounds as channels for expression and communication for personal and client projects.

Alim Ringgold is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. Engaging primarily with ceramic sculpture and sound, they use these mediums as tools for developing a language of personal symbolism and spirituality informed by a desire to intermingle and dissolve the boundaries between our physical, spiritual, and emotional realities. Most recently performing and showing work under the moniker Neolith, Alim utilizes noise, performance, and sculptural installation to bring forth disruptive wisdom embedded in the metaphors of stone and the earth's many magical and transformative geologic processes.

Anne Chen (b.1991, DC) is a Taiwanese-American craft artist who makes things you can touch. Her work endeavors to bring to light the ancient histories and false narratives woven into objects. Her research explores how physical artifacts, whether stolen through colonization or having migrated in someone's suitcase, carry unspoken values that can only be revealed through context, the density of the environment, and the attention of the interpreter.

Arielle Wilkins is a U.S. Portland-based artist/designer raised in the heart of Texas. Color, creativity, and black pride intertwine in the magical mystery ride within Arielle's art. She effortlessly notes the evolution of the portrait painting tradition and makes anyone who views her pieces smile. Her characters exist in a world more bold and colorful than our own. Where natural hair roams free and strong yet relaxed/confident/ personas come to the forefront. Arielle's work is meant to prompt a wide spectrum of untapped exposure and celebration of black culture.

Bridgette Hickey is an artist who explores interspecies and multidimensional communication with her ancestors and beyond human beings. She works in repetitive, time-intensive traditional mediums of weaving fragmented and disembodied themes and materials. This includes weaving, writing, natural dyeing, quilting, sculpture, poetry, vocalizations, and performance. They are an artist, community herbalist, poet, educator, and care worker developing their skills in textiles, education, and grief facilitation. In the spring of 2023, Bridgette installed her floating sculpture “Amplification” at Oregon Contemporary for homeschoolpdx’s show “Omens of Capacity.” “Amplification” begins her new body of work: Symbology of an Echo/Dream Amulet.

Brit Abuya (They/Them) is a first-generation trans non-binary artist from the Filipinx diaspora based in Portland, OR. They grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, where their passion for creating art was formed. Their work navigates an indescribable urge to get to know themselves better. Their practice is confessional and deeply personal, unpacking their past and present experiences in an attempt to connect with others who might have parallel or similar experiences. All of their works are self-portraits unless stated otherwise. @just___brit

Bryan Yonki is an artist, sign painter, and teacher currently based in Portland, Oregon. His love for hand-painted signs began during his childhood in Santiago, Chile, where he grew up admiring the art adorning public transportation buses and witnessed the decline of this traditional craft. For the past seven years, Bryan resided in Los Angeles, California, where he taught himself the art of sign painting and established his own sign studio called "Well Done Signs" in 2016. Bryan actively shares his knowledge through workshops and frequently travels to offer these in various cities across the West Coast.

Christina Martin (She/they) is a Mexican-American, Queer, interdisciplinary artist and printmaker. Originally from Dallas Texas, they moved to Portland, OR where they received their MFA in Print Media from The Pacific Northwest College of Art. Christina’s work challenges traditional printmaking as well as traditional ideas. Their material exploration often transforms the print past paper, introducing and interlacing new forms of media with various printmaking techniques. Within their artistic practice, they engage in conversions of identity and expression. Their work is rooted within their own intersectionality and alternative embodied experience. Overall, their work evokes a space for self-exploration, self-love, and pleasure.

Claire Barrera is an artist, activist, and educator based in Portland, Oregon. They are the author of the new zine el lenguaje nos gusta y nos confunde and the coeditor of When Language Runs Dry. Upcoming collaborations include work with Allie Hankins and Maya Dalinsky. They work in anti-violence movements and organize with Brown Girl Rise.

Claire Gunville (Seattle, Washington) is a visual artist and printmaker based in Portland, Oregon. By employing used and outdated electronic items, her work ruminates on the ways in which humans have impacted our global ecology through technological advancements. Her work has been shown at Blackfish Gallery, MRKT Gallery, and Carnation Contemporary. She was awarded a Make|Learn|Build grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council in 2021. Claire works as the gallery assistant to Nucleus Portland and received her BFA in Printmaking from Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Daniel J Glendening is an artist and arts worker living in Northern California on Southern Pomo land. He has exhibited internationally, has published several essays, artist’s books, and one novel, and is a founding member of the artist-led paranormal research team GWC Investigators. Past work has included accumulating embodied objects, scouring the night skies for UFOs, speaking to ghosts in Eastern Oregon, and broadcasting messages to outer space.

Daniela Repas is a Bosnian born visual artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work ranges from drawing and animation to installation and film. She has shown her work nationally and internationally, from New York to New Zealand. She is a recipient of the Dorothy Lemelson Scholarship and an alumna of the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she earned an MFA in Visual Studies. In 2019 she was a recipient of the Princess Grace Award and in 2020 an IEFTA Award. In 2023 she was awarded the Oregon Media Arts Fellowship Award for her work in film and visual arts.

Daphne Kauahi'ilani Jenkins is a culinary artist, writer, and micro baker whose work explores identity and belonging as a mixed Kanaka' Ōiwi and Keiki O Ka' Āina ("child of the land") born and raised in Hawai'i, now living in the diaspora. Through stories, recipes, and dishes, she expresses her deep love and longing for Hawai'i while allowing herself to break tradition and embrace diasporic influences as joyful play. Her work aims to disrupt the mainstream media constructs of "Hawai'i" and "Hawaiians" by leveraging intrigue and deliciousness to add nuance, depth, and complexity of flavors and textures to conversations about Hawai'i.

Emilly Prado is an award-winning author, journalist, educator, and D.J. Her debut essay collection, FUNERAL FOR FLACA, won a 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Award, among others. Her writing has appeared in 30+ publications, including NPR, Marie Claire, Eater, and The Oregonian. She is a Tin House and Las Dos Brujas workshop alum. She has earned fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Randolph College MFA, where she graduated, and a journalism fellowship (awarded by Oregon Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Pulitzer Prizes). Emilly co-founded BIPOC arts non-profit, Portland in Color, and Noche Libre Latiné DJ collective.

Jordany Genao is a Dominican interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Queens, New York (Lenapehoking). Their work has a reverence for nature while also building on Dominican folk art and identity, which pays homage to Arawak-Taino ancestry. Their practice emphasizes visual and theoretical connections between Arawak-Taino cosmology, ceramics, Caribbean plants, and queerness. Since Genao received their BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2014, their work has been featured in group shows at Flux Factory and Turley Gallery, among others. They completed their MFA at Hunter College in May 2023.

Julia Keefe (Nez Perce) is an internationally acclaimed Native American jazz vocalist, bandleader, actor, and educator based in New York City. Her professional career has spanned nearly two decades, and she has headlined marquee events at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., NMAI-NY, as well as opened for the likes of 20-time GRAMMY Award winner Tony Bennett and 4-time GRAMMY Award winner Esperanza Spalding. Her life's work is the revival and honoring of the legendary Coeur d'Alene jazz musician Mildred Bailey. It leads the campaign for Bailey's induction into the Jazz Hall of Fame at Lincoln Center. In addition to rehearsing for an upcoming album, she is currentlydirecting the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, a new project highlighting the history and future of Indigenous people in jazz, and the Mildred Bailey Project, which will be releasing its first studio recording in the fall of 2023.

Kyle b. co. is a transdisciplinary artist, performer, and printmaker. Their work often investigates cultural modes of violence through the material engagement of imbued objects, imagery, and surfaces. They are currently exploring race as an embodied sense through the mediums of sound and performance.

Laura Heit An interdisciplinary artist, Laura Heit’s work has been exhibited and screened in the US and abroad, at venues including Track 16 (Los Angeles, CA), Boise Art Museum (Boise ID), Adams and Ollman (Portland, OR), The Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR), The Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland OR), She Works Flexible (Houston, TX), REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), MoMA (NYC, NY), Millennium Film (NYC, NY), Pompidou (Paris, France), TBA Festival (Portland, OR), and Detroit Institute of the Arts (Detroit, MI) among others. She currently lives and works in Portland Oregon.

Mali Obomsawin is a bassist, singer, and composer from Odanak First Nation and one of GRAMMY.com's top ten emerging jazz artists to watch this year. Her debut album, Sweet Tooth (Out of Your Head Records, 2022), garnered international acclaim and was named in 'Best of the Year' lists from The Guardian, NPR, and JazzTimes upon its release. Evocative and thunderous, Sweet Tooth delivers a gripping and dynamic performance, seamlessly melding chorale-like spirituals, folk melodies, and post-Albert Ayler free jazz. Obomsawin's ensemble occupies a completely different musical universe, bringing skronk and reverence to every stage.

Marvin Parra Orozco is a Portland-based printmaker. His interdisciplinary work focuses on identity, culture, spirituality, and uplifting marginalized communities. He uses layering, cultural symbols, abstraction, fragments, and photo collage as a means of creating a utopian world. Marvin Parra Orozco uses prayer as a means of survival. His hopes and dreams with his work are to help others imagine a different kind of world where love and community are at the root.

Matt Perez is an artist from Northwest Indiana living in Portland, Oregon. Perez graduated from the University of Southern Indiana (USI) with an emphasis on woodworking and sculpture. After completing the Efroymson Family Bridge Year Fellowship, Perez was accepted into the Pacific Northwest College of the Arts (PNCA) Masters Program for Visual Studies. Perez completed his master’s degree from PNCA in 2020, has exhibited in multiple solo and group exhibitions in Indiana and Oregon, and was a panelist during the 2019 International Sculpture Conference in Portland. Perez has worked as an assistant to the sculptor Pete Beeman.

Maya Lewis went to Arcadia University, where she received her BFA in Painting and Art Therapy in 2019. After returning home to Albany, she explored many different mediums: murals, jewelry, pottery, and paper-making. She's been in a few local shows, including Albany International Airport, Saratoga Arts Center, and Second Street Studio. She works at Hamilton Hill Arts Center in Schenectady, NY, where she teaches art to children ages 5-13. She finds time for her personal work as a Waterbrook Potter's Studio member. She plans to do more projects that uplift Black artists in the Capital Region.

Melanie Griffin is a Virginia-based artist who was born in Georgia. She received a B.A. in Visual Arts at Antioch College in 2004. Through textiles and performance, Melanie explores issues around home, sickness, healing, race, gender, and sexuality. She creates talismanic-like pieces through vibrant colors, geometric shapes, and symbolism. She has been a part of group shows at the Pasadena Arts Armory, the Queer Biennial, Human Resources, SOMArts, and LACE. Melanie has attended residencies at The Los Angeles Feminist Center, Marble House, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center For The Arts, and Millay.

Sara Victorio (she/her) is a Filipino American ceramicist from the San Francisco Bay Area. She moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2016 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in social sciences. Her ceramic work converges form, function, and color with an emphasis on traditional methods. She reveres traditional craft and folk art as integral touchstones for the longevity and utility of beautiful objects in the everyday. Sara strives to soften the boundaries between craft and fine art in order to increase accessibility and spotlight the grit of handmaking.

Tamika Abaka-Wood (b. 1989, London, UK) is an NYC-based cultural anthropologist, strategist, and artist. Tamika’s practice is anti-disciplinary and honors the in-between, emergent, and liminal. Dependent on context and power structures, she is devoted to being invited or trespassing into worlds to interrogate and explore both from an “inside” and an “outside” perspective to co-create more potent, equitable, and life-enhancing possibilities for our futures. She’s deadly serious but having fun with it at the same time. More info on: www.tamikabakawood.com or www.dial-an-ancestor.com

Zoë Gamell Brown is a queer Boviander Guyanese American integrative artist, educator, and storyteller based at Kalapuya Ilihi in Eugene, Oregon. Their work explores multiplicity within Guyanese relationality, extending from and beyond South American shores to the Caribbean Sea and Gulf Coast through ceramics, culinary catharsis, creative nonfiction, experimental video, restorative cartography, and photopoetry. Brown is a doctoral student in the University of Oregon Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies’ inaugural cohort and a New Media Culture Certificate recipient. They are a teaching apprentice with Literary Arts’ Writers in the Schools, a Seeding Justice Lila Jewel Award winner, and a Charles A. Reed Graduate Fellow through the UO College of Arts and Sciences. Learn more about their work: zoegamell.com.

Nan Curtis-MFA from Univ of Cincinnati & BA from College of Wooster. Major exhibitions-DiverseWorks; Tacoma Art Museum; ConsolidatedWorks; PICA, Eliz Leach Gallery, Holding Contemp. She received the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship and attended residencies at YVML, OCAC & Caldera. ArtForum, The Oregonian and Seattle Stranger covered her and is in collections-Portland Art Museum, Sarah Miller Meigs, Reed College. She taught at PNCA for 27 years. She is training to be a Death Doula and volunteers in Hospice.

Alena Chun is a tattoo artist in Portland, Oregon. Alena was born in the bay area and moved to Portland in 2002. She began tattooing in 2007. Alena works primarily in the American Traditional tattoo style and is inspired by projects that explore personal identity. In her own work she combines elements of the signature traditional style with exploration of her Asian/ mixed race identity. Outside of tattooing she explores linocuts and is passionate about the critique, growth and appreciation for the history of her industry.

Ana Hurtado-Gonzalez (they/she) is an multi-disciplinary artist living in Portland, Oregon. They are deeply interested in how mythology shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. She is particularly drawn to creating images of powerful women and non-binary folks in fantasy settings, claiming space in a genre that often caters to the male gaze. Ana hopes to create stories that will help people feel less alone in their experiences, to find a way to interact with unknown ancestors, and to see history and mythology as organic and living things.

Armon Collins is a father, visual artist, and independent recording artist born and raised in Los Angeles. He creates and performs under the name Scarub and is part of an underground West Coast rap crew called Living Legends.

Carson Terry (b. 1978, AZ) is an artist based in Portland, OR. He studied sculpture at both the Penland School of Craft and Oregon College of Art and Craft. He wants his work to require the viewer to consider the object's presence, material choice, and impact, to create a relationship with the object. Solo exhibitions: Sunlan, Lowell, Shop House, Manuel Izquierdo Gallery. Publications: Metalsmith, Architectural Digest, American Craft Magazine, Vogue Hong Kong, HypeBeast, and Popeye Magazine.

Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento is an artist-scholar focusing on experimental performance and cultural negotiations onstage. She received a Consulate General of Brazil in New York Arts Grant to direct Pornographic Angel, her published adaptation of Nelson Rodrigues’ short stories at The Ohio Theater. She is the author of Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor’s Work: Foreign Bodies of Knowledge (Routledge, 2008) and After the Long Silence: The Theater of Brazil’s Post-Dictatorship Generation (Routledge, 2019), as well as numerous articles. Tatinge Nascimento is the recipient of fellowships from Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub and Freie Universität-Berlin, among others.

Dey Rivers is a non-binary Black American emerging writer and visual artist living with depression, CPTSD, and the bodily manifestations thereof. They are inspired by different modes of storytelling, history, botanical motifs, breaking harmful cycles, foodways, plant/land medicine, relationships, and ancestral spiritual practices. Dey has an educational background in fine arts and mental health advocacy. They especially enjoy creating, guiding, and learning in creative communities where they live on stolen land.

Héctor Ornelas is a first generation Mexican-American artist who lives and works in Portland. His work explores identity and belonging, examining his own navigation between two cultures and between borders (in Spanish, ni de aquí me de allá). Ornelas juxtaposes eclectic imagery from popular culture to invite viewers into conversations of fluidity, positionality and sense of self. He received his BFA from Portland State University in 2017 focusing on painting.

India Sky Davis’s interdisciplinary art practice of film, dance, acrobatics, music, writing, and storytelling investigates the invisible forces of power, ancestry and spirit that shape her experience, and engages radical imagination as a source for transformation, communion, homecoming, liberation, and survival. Her work as a stage and film director, producer, choreographer and performer is guided by her passion for world making and her practice of creating and contributing to platforms that uplift Black, queer and femme voices. India received an MA in Artist Film and Moving Image from Goldsmiths University of London in 2020.

Mark Palmen is a multimedia artist currently living in Portland Oregon. He has a BFA from SAIC (2012) and a MFA from PNCA (2014). He has a background in event production and public relations in fashion. He spent 10 years with the late great Vivienne Westwood as her PA and Director of PR in NYC. He currently serves on the Board of Directors and Chair of Events for Converge 45. This will be his first residency.

Nadia F. Almond-Chaparas is a multidisciplinary artist currently focused on design through clay and wardrobe styling. She finds inspiration through architecture, fashion, food, desire, light, film, the outdoors, pop culture, people watching, construction, life, her childhood view of the 90s and more. Nadia currently resides in Portland, Oregon with her dog, Neo.

Ralph Pugay was born in the province of Cavite, Philippines and has lived in Portland, OR for most of his adult life. His work has been included in exhibitions nationally, including venues such as the Seattle Art Museum, Upfor Gallery, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Marinaro, AA|LA, and King School Museum for Contemporary Art. Pugay is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award and a Betty Bowen Award, among others.

Sarah Farahat is a transdisciplinary Egyptian American artist, activist and educator dreaming of a more collective future for all beings. She teaches at local universities, for youth in her community, and is a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. For the past fourteen years Farahat has monitored the body within the socio-political landscape in the United States and abroad-intervening with works exploring grief, longing, assimilation and storytelling Learning about and participating in grassroots struggles for liberation, abolition, and self-determination inform her art and design. Her days are infused with speculative fiction, music, water, culinary experiments and plant medicine.

Sarah Meadows is an Oregon-based visual artist. She received her MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2008. She also holds a BA from the Evergreen State College and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at Melanie Flood Projects (Portland), Filter Photo (Chicago), and ClampArt (NYC) and is published by Publication Studio, the Institute for Interspecies Art & Relations, and One Day Projects.

Sa’rah Melinda Sabino is a Moroccan-American multimedia artist from Boston, MA, currently residing in Portland, OR. As a mixed-race woman, Rah’s work explores identity through the charged lens of identity. As a result of belonging to two differing worlds, her work aims to create a space for those who might similarly experience a tension of disparate races. That space hopes to inspire a feeling of belonging, claiming space within the duality and encouraging community.

Susan Aparicio (b. 1996, Bell, CA / Pico Rivera, CA) is a visual artist based in Los Angeles working in video, stained glass, and installation. She received her BA in Studio Art and Cognitive Science from the University of Virginia, and received her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles in Art - New Genres.

Tracy Kernell (he/him) is a Black filmmaker, photographer and writer from Fontana, California, currently living and working in Portland, Oregon. He centers his work on black life while paying close attention to the intersection of the peculiar and the mundane and how those two ways of being are in concert with each other. Tracy creates moving and still images that are homages to embodied rage and ecstasy to highlight the power within those emotions, going beyond passive, palatable Black movement and expression.

Vinh Pham was born in 1995 in Portland Oregon. They are a non-binary, bi-racial artist who employs an intuitive and improvisational process in a variety of multimedia projects. They graduated from Portland State University in 2019, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Through making they explore the intersectional dissonance that manifests in their identity. Their work dances the edge between body horror, and cotton candy; this marriage is called soft-gore and is used as an analytical tool that delineates connections between heritage, assimilation, and autonomy.

Will Matsuda (b. 1993) is a Japanese American writer and photographer whose work focuses on the intersections of race, capitalism, and the environment. His work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and National Public Radio, among other publications. He is based in Portland, Oregon, where he was born and raised. He is currently a photo editor at The New York Times.

Yoonhee Choi (Educated as a city planner, an architect, and an artist, Choi explores the potentials of unexpected materials to express both multiple scales of spatial experience and intimate, personal associations. In her projects, which range from tiny collages to room-size installations, she uses everyday materials to search for limits and possibilities. Her explorations seek to deepen her sensitivity to her surroundings and her art is the record of her perception. She strives to create conversations with her viewers both to inspire aesthetic contemplation of mundane objects and material and to awaken awareness of critical issues that are overlooked or willfully ignored.