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C E L I N A A G U I L A R
Celina Aguilar was born in El Paso, Texas. Growing up on the border exposed to social injustices at an early age has heavily defined and influenced Celina's work. She received her BS in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. While studying at UT she discovered Theatre of the Oppressed and became highly involved the Voices Against Violence Project. She worked to integrate TO methods and art while working as the Sexual Assault Prevention Education at the Williamson County Crisis Center. While at WCCC she worked with Feminist Voices at Southwestern University to create events for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. In addition, she successfully organized Art and Poetry event for Sexual Assault Survivors during SAAM in 2005. Continuing in her commitment to social justice she worked as administrator with the Trans-National Workers Rights Clinic, Capital Punishment Center, and Public Service Lawyering Internship at University of Texas School of Law. In 2007 she collaborated with three other artists to design a two mile span of land along the border for the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez Binational Design Competition and and received the Nestor Valencia award for second place. Most recently she co-authored Collaborations and Complexities at School of the Art Institute of Chicago" for the National Community Arts National Convening Project to be published on the Community Arts Network website. While residing in Chicago for graduate school she worked with the MGR Foundation's Murals program -it provides youth with an opportunity to use creativity to address issues relevant to their life. In May of 2008 she finished her MA in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While she doesn't always have time to take photographs she has continues to remain passionate about photography. Currently Celina lives in Austin, Texas.
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M A R I T Z A B A U T I S T A
maritza bautista is a bilingual (Tex-Mex, pocha Tejana) visual arts and video artist, educator, published author, independent curator, and cultural worker. She received a MA in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Psychology with a minor in Studio Art from Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas (2001). maritza has been working in the arts non-profit sector for over ten years now. She has collaborated with youth in rural South Texas and Jornaleros (day laborers) in Chicago to produce short, video documentary projects exploring issues unique to marginalized communities. Currently maritza lives in Chicago and works at Rumble Arts Center, an accessible cultural space that facilitates the empowerment and education of individuals and communities in Humboldt Park.
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T A R A B E T T S
Tara Betts is a lecturer in creative writing at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. She is also a Cave Canem fellow.
Tara’s poetry and prose has appeared in various journals and anthologies. She has also been a freelance writer for publications such as XXL, The Source, BIBR, Mosaic Magazine and Black Radio Exclusive. She has also contributed to interdisciplinary collaborations such as John Sims’ “Recoloration Proclamation” and “Rhythm of Structure” installations, filmmaker Nijla Mu’min, and Peggy Choy Dance Company’s “THE GREATEST: An Afro-Asian Tribute to Muhammad Ali” among others.
Tara Betts encourages literacy and works with arts programs. In Chicago, she was an influential educator. Tara co-founded GirlSpeak, a weekly writing/leadership workshop for young women. She has also conducted short-term workshops in schools, community centers, Ms. Foundation, City Girls (a substance abuse rehabilitation center for teen girls), Cook County Jail and Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, Louder Arts Project, Cooper Union, Dodge Foundation’s Poets-In-The-Schools program and London’s Roundhouse.
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M I S H A F E R G U S O N
Oakland, California native, Misha Ferguson has become prolific in her creaive expressions through her thirst for the absorbency of culture, pace, curiosity and spiritual growth. She has a BFA from Pratt Institute in New York and a MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art Education. Misha's work has been viewed in a variety of settings through collaboration of murals, student shows, and cafes in Brooklyn. In the Bay Area, she's exhibited work in places such as the Art of living Center, Berkeley Open Studios for Art of living Black exhibition, The Prescott-Joseph Annual Women's Art Show in West Oakland, and a number of shows at Gallery One in San Francisco including the Revelations show where she was one of 6 resident artists in the featured exhibit. In Chicago, she participated in charitable events bidding her work for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and produced live paintings for "ink bombed" a symposium on Chicago graffiti artists. Along with her exhibition history she has consistently performed spoken word poetry at featured events in Chicago, the Bay Area and New York City.
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S A M A N T H A L I A P E S
Samantha Liapes has been supporting the development of social change organizations for nearly two decades. She currently serves as the Development and Communications Director of a member-driven, grassroots racial and economic justice organization in San Francisco. Samantha was the founding Director of a national collaboration of progressive youth and student organizations and worked for eight years, in various roles, at the nationally-acclaimed Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Samantha has a long-time commitment to promoting youth cultural expression and leveraging art for social change and helped to develop several community-based and international new media projects. She also supports the personal development of social change leaders and cultural workers as a certified Somatic Coach.
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D E M E T R I O M A G U I G A D
Demetrio is the new media manager of the Community Media Workshop. Demetrio’s focus is on developing and implementing the organization’s strategic online communications and managing the development and production of new media resources and tools including web projects and the annual "Getting On Air, Online & Into Print media guide". Demetrio recently oversaw the creation, development and launch of the Workshop’s new online media guide—found at www.chicagomediaguide.org.
He is an expert on social media, online strategy and web platforms and has presented his work on how nonprofits can leverage the web at various national and local conferences and lectures series. He is also a co-convener of NetTuesday Chicago, a monthly meet-up group bringing together web advocates, technologists, nonprofits and grassroots organizations to bridge the gap between technology and community development.
Demetrio also hosts and produces the Chicago is the World" radio program on WHPK 88.5 FM in Chicago, where he features and interviews local artists, musicians and community activists on its international format. His other areas of expertise include Video and audio develop and production and WordPress builds and customization. He has a bachelor’s degree in Multi-media & Web Development from Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago.
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M A R C E L A M O R Á N
Marcela Morán is an award-winning filmmaker and educator. She is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas and a co-founder of Media Del Monte, a summer youth media-training institute in rural South Texas. Morán is a border woman, raised on the US/Mexico border in Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, México. Her work deals with migration/immigration, border landscape and bicultural issues.
Morán has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio University’s School of Film and a an undergraduate in Radio/TV/Film from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been showcased at numerous international film festivals, galleries and conferences.
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K Y M O L S E N
Kym Olsen is a performance artist whose primary focus is a collaboration with Trevor Martin. In addition, she creates solo work and performance installations that have been shown in a varitey Midwest and Northeastern locations. Outside of performance work, she has served on N.A.M.E. Gallery's Time Arts Committee, Insight Arts' Women's Performance Jam, has volunteered for New Haven's Independent Film Festival and independently organized performance events at (untitled) space, a contemporary art gallery in New Haven, Connecticut and Insight Arts in Chicago. She has taught part-time at the School of the Art Institute and been a visiting artist at several Universities including Columbia College and Transylvania University, and held performance workshops at Links Hall and the Spareroom in Chicago. Currently, Kym lives in San Francisco.
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A I S L I N N P U L L E Y
Aislinn Pulley is a performance artist, poet and visual artist. She is a founding member of Insight Arts, as well as a member of the performance ensemble, End of the Ladder. She is a founding and former member of the performance ensemble Edges. She is a founder of the young women's performance ensemble, Visibility Now and also the founder and creator of urban youth magazine Underground Philosophy. Aislinn has received a couple of awards, some of which include a Congressional award in art and an award from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts for her poetry. Currently, Aislinn is serving as the President of the Board of Insight Arts.
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A M I P A S C U A L S P E A R
Ami Pascual Spear is a writer and recently finished her first children’s book. She practiced urban planning while a community organizer in San Francisco’s skid row, the Sixth Street Corridor. She later founded and became executive director of the South of Market Foundation, a neighborhood economic development nonprofit that she ran for 10 years before spinning it off into a city-wide organization renamed Urban Solutions. Ami also managed the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF’s School of Medicine for three years before moving to Los Angeles in 2004. She is currently a strategic planning, capacity building and technical writing consultant in Los Angeles and has produced a documentary film on the impact of air and toxics pollution on communities-of-color. Ami was a founding member of the GABRIELA Network, served on the boards of Resources for Community Development, the Yerba Buena Child Development Center, BRAVA for Women in the Arts and the Embarcadero YMCA. She has a B.A. in English and American Literature from UCLA and a Masters in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley. Ami is a graduate of the Development Training Institute’s Leadership and Management Program in Community Development and a 1997 awardee of a Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership fellowship on democracy.
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K E L I S T E W A R T
Keli Stewart’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quiddity, Meridians, Naugatuck River Review, Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, Torch Poetry, Hip Mama, On Becoming, Calyx, Reverie and Spaces Between Us, among others. Keli has received artist fellowships from Hedgebrook, where she was awarded the 2010 Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Award and the Augusta Savage Gallery’s Arts International Residency Program. Selected by the Illinois poet laureate, she was awarded the first place 2010 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award from the Illinois Center for the Book Emerging Writers Prize. She is an alum of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation and Callaloo Summer Writing Workshops. She also served as the Artistic Director for three years of "Body Politics," a performance project about women of color, identity and body image with the Women of Color Leadership Network at UMass-Amherst. She received her BA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College and an MFA from Chicago State University. She is a single mother of two wonderful sons and is at work on her debut poetry collection.
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