leo ariel is best known for their visual poetry and iconographic installation art. Born and raised in Miami, FL, their work focuseson healing, relationships, and culture. Using spanish language and references to Cuban and Dominican cultural/spiritual practices, they eclaim and establish their voice as a nonbinary Caribbean artist. Their installations, writings, and performance are allegorical of growing up as a child of immigrants and surviving abuse in a world that actively works against gender nonconforming people. Line, shape, repetition, and form of their poetry is a means of rejecting rigid notions of writing. Installations use altar motifs as a means of reclamation and grounding of identity; striving to create representation and solidarity to the most marginalized.

Derrais (d.a.) Carter is a Black educator and creative living in Black Portland. He makes work for/about/with/after Black folk and is far less optimistic than the picture accompanying this bio suggests. Also, he enjoys 1970s soul music and cognac.

Ashley Stull Meyers is a writer, editor, and curator. She has curated exhibitions and public programming for a diverse set of arts institutions along the west coast, including those in San Francisco, CA, Oakland, CA, Lake Tahoe, Seattle, WA, and Portland, OR. She has been in academic residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE) and the Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta). She is currently Northwest Editor for Art Practical and has contributed writing to Bomb Magazine, Rhizome, Arts.Black and SFAQ/NYAQ. In 2017 Stull Meyers was named Director and Curator of The Art Gym. She is based in Portland, OR.

Patricia Vázquez Gómez lives and works between Portland and Mexico City. Her practice includes a range of media, from painting and murals to video and socially engaged art projects, and it is deeply informed by her experiences working as organizer and educator in the immigrant rights and other social justice movements, both in content and in the methodologies she uses. Her work has been shown at the Portland Art Museum, the Reece Museum, the Autzen Gallery at Portland State University, and the Houston Art League; but also in other spaces as apartments complexes, community based organizations and schools. She is the recipient of the 2013 Arlene Schnitzer Visual Arts Prize and has received grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC), the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland’s Jade and Midway Districts and the Oregon Community Foundation.