Ciara Darnise Miller, a native of Chicago, holds both an MFA and MA in Poetry and African American/African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University. She also received her BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a Cave Canem fellow who has published poems and academic essays in such collections and periodicals as Break Beat Poets, African American Review, Callaloo, Muzzle, Alice Walker: Critical Insights, Chorus, and many more. She currently lives in Chicago where she serves as a Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse professor at DePaul University as well as an Afro-American Studies professor at Kennedy King College.

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Divya Srinivasan (she/her) is an emerging artist, technologist, and designer. Her background is in Materials Science and she worked in the 3D-printing industry. She is currently earning her Master of Design degree at UC Berkeley. She is technology-agnostic, working at the intersections of materials, systems, and community-focused design. Her work focuses on nature through different lenses- the use of nature-derived materials, interactions of art with nature, as well as mimicking the systems and patterns found in nature. In addition, Divya has extensive experience in ceramics, woodworking and exploring natural and living materials in her sculptures. 

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Enneréssa LaNette is a multi-hyphenate artist and serves as the CEO/founder of Praize Productions, Inc. She received a bachelor's degree in secondary education and a master’s degree in educational leadership from Indiana University Northwest. She studied under dance legend, Joel Hall, and was a member of the Joel Hall Dancers. As an accomplished director and artist, she’s written, produced, and choreographed ten full-length productions and one motion picture awarding her ten Black Excellence Awards and a Black Theater Alliance Award. She uses her vast background in education and the arts to curate unique artistic experiences that amplify the voices of people and communities of color.

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Lisa Candela is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist based in New York City who works in paper mache, fabrics and oil paint. She recently received her MFA from The City College of New York in May of 2023. She started her training at The School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League, New York. Her creative process is a dynamic exploration of the female figure with an intricate dance between correction and acceptance of the female form. She has shown at galleries such as Local Project, Amos Eno Gallery, and the Fountain House Gallery, New York. Her recent shows include “Every Woman Biennial 2024” at LaMaMa Galleria, New York, NY, “Women in the Heights: Dress” at NoMAA, New York, NY, “The Face of Justice” at The Kota Alliance, and “Transplants” at Amos Eno Gallery, Brooklyn NY.

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Marshall Sharpe, born 1988, is from Greensboro, NC. He received his BA in Studio Art from Elon University in 2010 and his MFA in Painting from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2020.  Sharpe teaches 3D design, painting and drawing courses at Bakersfield College in Southern California as an Associate Professor.  He has also taught drawing and painting courses at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Utah Valley University, and the University of California Santa Barbara.  In the spring of 2024, he was selected as the incoming Director of the Jones Art Gallery at Bakersfield College.  His creative work focuses on ancestry, identity, and transience through a queer lens.

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Nicole R. Zimmerman (she/her) is a Brazilian-born, queer Jewish American writer who values storytelling as an act of social engagement and thrives on creative inspiration from fellow artists. She earned an MFA from the University of San Francisco and was a 2020 recipient of Creative Sonoma’s Discovered Awards for Emerging Literary Artists. Her writing appears in The New York Times (Tiny Love Stories), Longreads, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction, among other publications. Nicole lives with her wife in Petaluma, California where she leads workshops using the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) method. She is revising a memoir entitled Just Some Things We Can't Talk About.

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Thandiwe Wilson studies English with a concentration in Creative Writing at Howard University and will be graduating in May 2024. Her visceral and descriptive style of writing comes from Thandiwe’s intentionality in each word placed on the page. Her work has been performed in multiple readings such as the 804 Reading Salon in Washington, D.C. and the Final Reading at Howard University. Thandiwe’s personal passion is developing creative communities. She has done this by holding multiple film experiences and open mic nights. All of which showcase emerging African-American artists including painters, sculptors, spoken-word artists, fashion designers, and musicians around the D.C. area. She held two of these events as the Co-Director of the BURN Experience and held four of these events as Director of Sankofa Open Mic Nights. Thandiwe's passion for horror through the Black gaze comes from her interest in the raw fear of reality for people within the African Diaspora.

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Clementine Wright is a ceramics, glass and mixed media artist currently residing in Boise, Idaho. She received her BFA in Ceramics from California State University Fullerton in 2016 and her MFA at Boise State University in Studio Art in 2021. Her ceramic and mixed media work focuses on the materials and natural forces of degradation and ephemerality in nature and in human interaction as it relates to cycles of birth and death. She has shown in galleries nationally and won first place for her work entitled “Caught” residing in the CSUF permanent collection. She won the Graduate College award at BSU in 2019 for her installation “Hive”. Her work was recently selected for the Idaho Triennial at the Boise Art Museum. Her solo show Metamorphosis was on view this past summer at Delia Dante Gallery, Boise Idaho. She teaches art within the community of Boise and the City of Boise working with Veterans, Seniors, Disabled Adults, and the Teen/Adult adaptive program, as well as Adjunct Professor of Sculpture/ 3-D design at the College of Western Idaho.

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Ella Sams is a map maker, illustrator, multimedia creator, and whitewater canoeist raised in Athens, GA, currently living and working from the rural river town of Long Creek, SC. Her work, both commissioned and exhibited, extends to over 8 states and 3 countries. In her recent work, Ella uses locally-sourced river water and red clay to explore a visual parallel between her work commute past logging sites and the isolation that many children are experiencing due to social media culture and the permanent social effects of the pandemic. She seeks to use art-making to grow community resilience. 

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Adopted from China and raised in Texas, Grace Biltz is an artist pursuing her Bachelor of Tine Arts at Southwestern University in Georgetwon, Texas. She is also an alumni of Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas. Grace is a high-detail oriented artist who strives for realism; her mediums include drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and photography. Her primary focuses are on nature, wildlife, human anatomy and human form. She has participated in group art exhibitions at the 42nd Annual Central Texas Art Competition, MAC Gallery, and the Ro2 Art Gallery. Grace resides in Dallas, TX when not attending Southwestern University.

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Jon Fischer is an interdisciplinary artist from San Francisco whose roots lie in printmaking. Born to Jewish refugees from Morocco and Eastern Europe, his work explores the concept of intertwined place and home His artistic practice focuses on the West Coast, using mediums such as screen printing, sound, video, and installation. Having lived and worked in San Francisco for two decades, his pieces directly tap into the local knowledge of the Bay Area, frequently employing mapping as a crucial element. Recently, his interests have expanded to include related areas such as Humboldt Bay and the Middle East. Fischer's collaborative approach defines much of his recent work. For instance, his ongoing partnership with composer Danny Clay, Turntable Drawings, involves a growing collection of hand-molded records and has been presented alongside over twenty guest artists since 2006. Notably, this project has been featured in a public program at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Currently, Fischer also serves as a professor of Marine Engineering at the CSU Maritime Academy in Vallejo.

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Rick Gradone is a queer, 52-year-old painter working in Oakland, CA. Functioning at the intersection of religion and geology, his work imagines a new, inclusive, futuristic religion based on a unified view of the earth. By using common rocks from places all over the world as the symbols of this religion, he creates a singular iconography based on the earth in its most stable form. With thousands to millions of years in the making, rocks tell the history of the earth in a snapshot of form in the present. As a focus of meditation, they reveal our place in time. Structured as studies for shrines and monuments, his rock paintings imagine spaces of worship and contemplation for all beings and suggest that revelation about this relationship has the power to create a new human responsibility to each other and to the planet.

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Susan D’Amato is a drawing-based artist whose creative research and practice integrates consciousness and contemplative disciplines with and through drawing process to investigate synergistic modes of perception. Her work combines representation and abstraction of natural forms through traditional and digital media to explore universal relationships between the physical and the ethereal, the personal and the transpersonal, the intimate and the infinite. Through these interactions, the work question’s that which is referred to as relational, identified, imagined, or expected. D’Amato is the recipient of national and international awards and has exhibited her work widely across the United States and internationally. She holds an MFA in Studio Art/Drawing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BFA in Painting, with concentrations in Drawing and Anthropology from the University of Connecticut. Her studio is based in Central NY, where she is an Associate Professor in College of Visual and Performing Arts, School of Art, at Syracuse University.

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To Adelle Patten, each painting is a window into her perceived reality. Based in Washington, DC, Patten’s work explores the omnipresence of natural and digital entities which define the 21st century’s virtual consciousness, or our collective digital awareness. Inverted colors and abrupt edge relationships embedded in organic imagery represent the coalescence of two realities: the analogue and the digital. Her multi-layered paintings involve visceral applications of acrylic paint, oil paint, spray paint and loose pigment. Patten held a solo exhibition, Coalescing Realities, at the Van Every Smith Gallery in Davidson, North Carolina and received her BA in Studio Art from Davidson College in the spring of 2021.

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Brittany R. Bradley is an award-winning alternative process photographer and an established museum and gallery professional. Her work has been featured in group exhibits at the Center for Photographic Art, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Photos De Femmes, the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, and the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival. As a museum collections registrar, Bradley has worked with the collections of renowned photographers including Andrew J. Russell, Dorothea Lange, Anne Brigman, and Joanne Leonard. She studied photography with Nigel Poor and Doublad Deringer at Sacramento State University, and she holds a B.A. in Photography. She studied the wet-plate collodion process with France Scully Osterman in Rochester, New York, and with David Emitt Adams and Claire A. Warden in Benabbio, Italy. Bradley uses a mobile darkroom to bring collodion photography to the public via demonstrations and artist talks.

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Daisy Kew is a queer, Welsh and Indigenous artist born and raised in the Inland Empire. They have been practicing art for the last four years exploring photography, painting, video production, and ceramics. They are a recent graduate of the BFA program at California State University, San Bernardino. As a multidisciplinary artist, they are interested in the relationship between people, their bodies, and the land as well as the way that exploring those concepts through various, and a combination of mediums can change the illustration of those relationships.

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Imani Mixon was born and raised at the magnetic center of the world’s cultural compass — Detroit, Michigan. She is a long-form storyteller who is inspired by everyday griots who bear witness to their surroundings and report it back out. Equal parts urgent and essential, her multimedia work centers the experiences of Black women and independent artists. Attending the Creekside Artist Residency will mark her transition into fiction.

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I’m an environmentalist and believe in bringing art and science together to promote important messages to the world. Art is a great way to communicate ideas in a fresh context – a way to “break the ice” and educate viewers without having to read data sheets and textbooks; offering new perspectives to contemplate, debate, and inspire. My goal is to capture different aspects of nature, ecology, philosophy and psychology and encourage a craving to pursue these subjects further. The more we learn about ecology and nature, the more likely we are to care for its survival. The more we explore the realm of the psyche, the better we understand ourselves as individuals and how we relate to the world around us.

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Lisa Shen is a Chinese-Canadian writer and spoken word artist based in Toronto, Canada. Her work centers on gender-based violence and disability rights. Lisa is the first place winner of the 2021 Mississauga Poetry Slam, and a Speaker at the TEDx McMasterU 2022 conference. She is also the winner of the May Open Drawer Poetry Contest by Britta Badour. She has performed at several arts festivals, including the JAYU Human Rights Film Festival and Humainologie Short Story Festival. As a passionate teacher, Lisa has created and instructed debate classes for youth. She is passionate about bringing the joys of spoken word into classrooms through workshops and showcases.

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Andie Aylsworth is a London-based multidisciplinary installation artist. Born in Miami, Florida, and raised by an Ecuadorian mother and English/Venezuelan father, Aylsworth learned a deep respect for nature from an early age, growing up in an urban landscape nestled between the vast natural beauty of the Everglades to the west and the Atlantic coast to the east. As a result of her upbringing, Aylsworth infuses her art practice with environmental curiosity. At the center of her work is a fascination with humankind’s relationship with the injured environment and she takes inspiration from the cohesion found between nature and humanity in indigenous cultures, especially her own as a descendent of the Quechua people of present-day Ecuador. Aylsworth is currently studying at Central Saint Martins College, London, where she has been exposed to new modes of making such as welding and different textile practices. She also works with International Curators Forum as a curation and installation assistant, working with different artists and artworks based on the diasporic experience. She has exhibited work internationally at institutions including Tate Collective, the National Gallery, and LUVA Gallery.

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Dr. Ashaki M. Jackson is the author of two chapter-length collections, Language Lesson (Miel, 2016) and Surveillance (Writ Large Press, 2016). Readers may find her poetry and essays in Obsidian, 7x7 LA, CURA, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Bettering American Poetry, among other publications. She currently serves as Executive Editor at The Offing literary magazine. She earned her MFA (poetry) from Antioch University Los Angeles and her doctorate (social psychology) from Claremont Graduate University.

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Hayden Casey is a writer and musician. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Washington and an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, West Branch, Bridge Eight, Bat City Review, Allium, and Yalobusha Review and was longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. His work circles themes of love, grief, family, and memory. He currently lives in Phoenix, AZ and teaches writing at Arizona State University. Find his music and writing at

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Jon Fischer is a San Francisco-based printmaker who also works in collaboration with other artists in video, installation, and sound. Born in California and raised in Pennsylvania by parents who were Jewish refugees from Morocco and Poland, Jon studied bioengineering and philosophy of science before his permanent return West, where he built an art practice based on his cross disciplinary background in drawing, science, and fabrication. He learned to screen print at CELLspace, the celebrated San Francisco arts warehouse (R.I.P.), worked at the Exploratorium in fabrication and education, and earned a degree in mechanical engineering from U.C. Berkeley, where he repurposed a 1200-pound factory assembly robot to assist orthopedic surgeons manipulating the human elbow joint. He’s operated a studio in the Mission District of San Francisco since 2005 and works as a professor of engineering technology at California State University Maritime Academy, the only maritime academy on the West Coast.

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Rhombie Sandoval is a photographer and storyteller currently residing in Southern California. Her entry into photography started after receiving a camera as a gift from the Make A Wish Foundation, a gesture arranged on her behalf due to being born with heart disease. With the camera, Sandoval realized she could navigate her shyness and connect with people using the camera as a tool to understand various vantage points, searching for and highlighting the common themes linked to one’s identity and location. Sandoval later studied Photography at Art Center College of Design. She is also the founder of Anywhere Blvd @anywhereblvd, a platform which features portrait photographers by promoting the narratives of their subjects.

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Anywhere Blvd