Abrava Ormiga

Author

Abrava Ormiga is healing trauma with interpersonal mediation education by learning life’s communion with time through ancient ancestral indigenous wisdom. Writing under a pen name, they hail from Noroeste de Pacífica, whose cascading waters inspire them to be a welcoming torrent from America’s cordillera worldwide. An emerging writer, their Mestiza American lineage is emphasized in their work, mixing anew past & present into surreal universal ideations; using power of fiction to formulate functional facts. Parables or Songs of our Ancient Illustrious Legend (PARA|SAIL) is a series in-development by Abrava, who’s gathering help to tell a nonlinear epic of galactic collision, solar salvation, and cosmic expansion.

Donasia Tillery

Writer and Public Speaker

Donasia Tillery (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Los Angeles, California. Grounded in a multidimensional approach to meaning-making, her work centers art as a mode of radical honesty, individual healing, and collective liberation. She earned her B.A. in Philosophy from Lehigh University and M.A. in Africana Studies from New York University. Her writing has been featured in Artillery Magazine, Curate LA, Electric Revival, and Spinelli Kilcollin Journal.

Elisabeth Buchet-Deák

Writer and Artist 

Elisabeth Buchet-Deák is a French-American writer and artist. Weaving together writing, embroidery, film, plants, and performance, and centering words and hapticity, she seeks pathways toward more connected and incorporated ontologies that embrace thinking and making as processes of exchange, growth, and personal and collective healing. Her pieces question the ways in which culture, knowledge, education, mind, and body have been removed from the material plane in the mechanistic model of the world. With her work she hopes to contribute to building a more sensitive world and to hold space for grief and care.

In 2020, Buchet-Deák was part of the editorial team for Sandstorm: And Then There Was Dust, an exhibition of work by Middle Eastern artists dealing with ecological issues in the Mesopotamian region that was shown in Istanbul and Berlin, for which she also wrote the essay “Assemblages of Loss: Extinction and Entanglement Between Two Rivers.” In 2021, she exhibited a body of work entitled Tendre/Reaching as part of the exhibition Force Fields at the Joseloff Gallery in Hartford, Connecticut. She earned a BA in Communication, Criticism and Curation from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, and an MFA in ecological and socially engaged art from the Nomad MFA at Hartford Art School. Buchet-Deák also works as a freelance translator, editor, and proofreader.

Haven Worley

Activist Artist and Filmmaker

Haven Worley is a multimedia artist based in Rochester, NY. She is originally from Portland, OR where she began her journey as a creative writer and musician. Now, she mixes her artistic process with multiple mediums in order to explore identity, sexuality, soundscapes, femininity, and environmental and racial justice. She is immersed in the craft of writing where she has been published in magazines such as Girl-ish and StudyBreaks. Her spoken word poetry has been performed in the Portland Verselandia and local PDX workshops. In Rochester, she works with local community organizations to better understand how the intersection of green spaces and art can benefit underserved communities like the one she grew up in. Helping to build communities and tell diverse stories of nonviolence and anti-racist narratives, Worley continues to engage in colloborative art at the University of Rochester where she studies Film and Media and art activism in her own major, Art for Social and Cultural Change.

Jayla Tang

Artist

Steeped in true millennial spirit, < JAYLA 湯 > (they & them) utilizes what others may spite as a “short-lived” attention span as their single greatest strength. As the former curator of numu LA, they favor rejection of the status quo, interacting with(in) queer galleries & abandoned flower shops alike. They aim to elevate issues & amplify voices through varied means of Art. You can find them on the regular wandering through cultural institutions, sifting through colors & papers, or immersed in sound making / listening practices. Whatever it takes is what they will use to further along change: from air-waving on the podium to typewriting in lavender & mint or plucking strings with painted nails, they seize every opportunity they are given to make an indisputable statement:

Art is intentionally iconoclastic.

Art is radically inclusive.

It is filled with / void of gender itself.

More simply, Art is an abstract portrayal of

possibilities / pluralities

Jayla received meaningful training through California Institute of the Arts, a fitting hub of cross-pollinating collaborators who strive to push boundaries & make tangible differences. There, they were encouraged to refine (& redefine) the genre-bending wizardry they now wield, in dire hopes of galvanizing future generations…

…to confuse, nuance, & liberate!

Kathryn Simmons

Writer

Kathryn Simmons is a cultural worker and emerging critic. From Southeast Mississippi, she offers critical perspectives on Southern culture, history and placemaking.  Exploring visual and performance art, literature, media, gender and sexuality, law and politics through criticism, commentary and cultural writing, Kathryn seriously considers Black femme practices of knowing, navigating, imagining and dreaming throughout her work. She aims to connect with stories at the very essence of her knowledge; creatively, she tends to an evolving curiosity attributed to her endurance. Kathryn Simmons graduated, summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, minor in Pre-law, from a Historically Black College & University (HBCU) in Mississippi.

David Adamo

Freelance Art Writer and Illustrator

David Adamo is a freelance art writer and illustrator based in Whittier, CA. He has written and illustrated the pieces DEAF (2020) and Reach and Change (2021) for MOZAIK Future Art Awards and premiered in Gallery 1064: ENERGY exhibit. He also specializes in graphic design and creating marketing content via commission. Additional illustrations and writings can be found in album cover artwork, published literature collaborations and graphic design apparel. Outside of his freelance career, he is an alumni of the AmeriCorps (Corporation for National and Community Service) and began his writing endeavors through grant writing and creating fundraising content for numerous non-profits during his time in the program. He continues to create artwork and other content under the name MrDVMO.

Rob Goyanes

Freelance writer and editor

Rob Goyanes is a writer and editor from Miami, Florida. His nonfiction has appeared in many places, including Affidavit, Art in America, BOMB, e-flux journal, GARAGE, Jewish Currents, Spike Art Magazine, and The Miami Herald, and his fiction has been supported by organizations such as Contemporary Art Stavanger and Key West Literary Seminar. As an editor, he works with magazines, book publishers, artists, scholars, and writers on a wide variety of texts. Goyanes is currently working on two books: one is about Asif Farooq, a friend who built a slightly larger than life-sized Soviet jet fighter out of paper and glue. The other book is a novel. Goyanes lives in New York, and is often back home.

Rodney Murray

Artist, Human, Writer

Rodney Murray Jr. is a Philadelphia-based dancer and writer. His work fuses a poetic approach to language alongside rigorous embodied practices to yield a romantic encounter between the body and the world. Laboring to practice in a variety of mediums, he demands urgency, curiosity, and sensibility to produce highly-complex performance landscapes that question the material and social conditions of 21st-century production. His writing has been published in dance art journal and Poet’s Row Issue I.

S. Kenan

Writer and Visual Artist

S. Kenan is a writer and visual artist whose body of work is informed by the intersecting issues of climate crisis, reparative justice and gender equity. A non-binary artist representing Disability Pride projects, they have been a fellow with The National Writing Project and the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, and they currently serve as an Advisor with the Minnesota State Arts Board in St. Paul, MN. With an MA in History with an emphasis on Race and Gender, their work has aired on Minnesota Public Radio, and appeared in Rain Taxi, NewPages, Bella Grace, numerous anthologies, and included in the ‘Best of 2020’ by The Bookends Review. Their exhibiting work has received multiple awards from CERF, the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Shana Nys Dambrot

Art Critic, Curator, Author

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. As the Arts Editor for the L.A. Weekly, and a contributor to Flaunt, Art & Cake, and Artillery, she approaches arts writing with an empathetic critique grounded in art history and a boundless appreciation for the power of art in society. She studied Art History at Vassar College, before leaving her native New York for the sunny climes of Los Angeles where she planned to stay “a couple of years,” and where she has instead lived and worked since 1995. Dambrot writes monographic book and exhibition catalog essays, curates and juries eclectic exhibitions, is a dedicated Instagram photographer, and is the author of the experimental novella Zen Psychosis (2020, Griffith Moon). She speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally, is a Co-Chair of ArtTable’s SoCal Chapter, an award-winning member of the LA Press Club, and sits on the Board of Art Share-LA the Advisory Council of Building Bridges Art Exchange.

Virginia Valenzuela

Managing Editor at SuperRare Labs

Virginia Valenzuela is a writer from New York City whose work has been published in Wired, The Independent, High Times, and the Best American Poetry Blog. She is the Managing Editor at SuperRare Labs, where she writes and commissions pieces on NFT artists and topics related to Web3 and the metaverse. She received a dual-MFA in Creative Writing from the New School, where she was the research assistant to David Lehman. She is in the process of tokenizing her poetry and writing her debut novel.