National Magazine Award finalist McKenzie Funk writes for Harper’s, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. His first book, Windfall, won a PEN Literary Award and was named a book of the year by The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Salon, and Amazon.com. A former Knight-Wallace Fellow and Open Society Fellow, he is a co-founder of the journalism cooperative Deca and a board member at Amplifier. He speaks five languages and is a native of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives with his wife and sons.
Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and designer who explores the resonance of genetic cultural memory through the mystical and the mundane. The child of two prolific creators, he developed his practice under the tutelage of his parents, Curtis R. Barnes and Royal Alley-Barnes. He is part of the Black Constellation, a collective that also includes Shabazz Palaces, THEESatisfaction, and Nep Sidhu. Alley-Barnes has exhibited sculpture and films in numerous traditional and new-media-based settings. He has been, and continues to be, instrumental in the creation of seminal cultural spaces in Seattle, including the influential mixed-use space pun(c)tuation, among others. In 2014, Alley-Barnes was the recipient of the Neddy Artist Award in the open medium category. Alley-Barnes lives and works in Seattle.
Born in Topeka, Kansas in a military family, Carol Rashawnna Williams is the only child of Bessie Williams & Willie C. Williams. Soon after birth Carol and her family moved to Frankfurt Germany where she grew up on a military base and went to German schools until she was 11 ½. At which time she and her mother settled in Tacoma, WA. Carol graduated from Mount Tahoma High School, went to the Evergreen State College, was an Upward Bound student of 4 years.
Carol’s mother was a certified missionary and gave her life to community service for over 25 years, feeding and sheltering those who were homeless. or re-entering society from prison. Carol’s father was a patriot and believed in American Democracy. He gave 28 years of his life to his country through military service.
After graduating from college Carol was accepted as a Vista-Americorps for 1 year in Seattle’s White Center neighborhood working with young single mothers of Head Start students get jobs and get into school. Carol had her first group exhibit at the Seattle Central Community College Gallery in 1990 when she attended Seattle Central College, it was a community college. Her second group exhibit was in 1996 at the Evergreen State College at which time her work was acquired and catalogued into The Evergreen State College’s (TESC) video art library and showcased into the TESC student anthology book.
Carol is a mother to 2 children. She currently resides in Seattle, WA and works to mentor emerging artists from various backgrounds. Carol is a musician of 21 years who plays the violin and the viola. Carol enjoys hiking in the Pacific Northwest’s numerous old growth forests. Carol was certified thru the City of Seattle Parks & Recreation Urban Forest Educator Program and loves to teach about conifers, indigenous and invasive species. You can find her walking all over Seattle.
Carol deeply believes in the power of art to build community, bridge community relationships and create authentic space for healing.
Austen Brown is an artist living in Chicago, IL, holding his Master of Fine Arts from the School at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is a Lecturer in the Sound Department. Using a site-based practice, he works with sound, video, and installation to draw conceptual lines between sites, using buildings as evidence to investigate histories of urban planning.
His work has been shown internationally at Super-Sensor, Madrid, Spain; The Chicago Artists Coalition, Chicago, IL; The Mission, Chicago, IL; EXPO Chicago, IL; Switched on Garden with funding from the Pew Charitable Trust, Philadelphia, PA; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE; Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA, among others.
Klara Glosova is a Czech-born visual artist based in Seattle. She is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in drawing, painting and printmaking. Her work is autobiographical, drawing inspiration from her dreams as well as daily life. Klara is also a founder of NEPO House and is always interested to see what happens when you place the inside out, invite the outside in and generally do things backwards. She received Seattle Magazine’s Spotlight Award in 2013. Seattle Art Museum’s Kayla Skinner Special Recognition Award, the New Foundation Fellowship and nomination for James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award in 2014. In 2015 she was nominated for the Stranger Genius Award and a Betty Bowen Award finalist in 2017. Klara is represented by Linda Hodges Gallery.
Rafael Soldi is a Peruvian-born, Seattle-based artist and curator. He holds a BFA in Photography & Curatorial Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has exhibited internationally at the Frye Art Museum, American University Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography, ClampArt, The Print Center, G. Gibson Gallery, Connersmith, Filter Space, and Burrard Arts Foundation, among others. Rafael is a 2012 Magenta Foundation Award Winner, and recipient of the 2014 Puffin Foundation grant, 2015 Portable Works Cultural Perspectives Purchase Grant, 2016 smART Ventures grant, 2016 Jini Dellaccio GAP grant, 2017 CityArtist Projects Grant, and a 2017 & 2019 4Culture Arts Projects Grant. He has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, PICTURE BERLIN, Oxbow Space, and the Bogliasco Foundation.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, King County Public Art Collection, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He has been published in PDN, Dwell, Hello Mr, Metropolis, GRAY, LUXE, Lagom, among others. His work has been reviewed on ARTFORUM, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, Lensculture, Photograph Magazine, The Seen, Art Nexus, and PDN. Rafael is the co-founder of the Strange Fire Collective, a project dedicated to highlighting work made by women, people of color, and queer and trans artists.
Lauren Levin is a poet, mixed-genre writer and art writer, author of The Braid (Krupskaya, 2016) and Justice Piece // Transmission (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018). With Emji Spero, they were developmental editor for We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, edited by Ellis Martin and Zachary Ozma (Nightboat, 2019), and with Eric Sneathen, they are editing Camille Roy’s selected prose. Their gender identity is some mix of belated queer, Jewish great-aunt, and aspirational Frank O’Hara. They are still figuring it out. They live in Richmond, CA, are from New Orleans, LA, and are committed to queer art, intersectional feminism, being a parent, and anxiety.
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist, & the author of Agon, a forthcoming chapbook from EconoTextualObjects; The Easy Body, a love letter from hell that was published in 2017 by Timeless, Infinite Light; and PDF, a chapbook published by Solar Luxuriance in 2014. Their work, cutting across various materials and disciplines, has been shown & performed in the Los Angeles River, galleries, punk houses, plazas, and microcinemas across the U.S. They are currently working on a project interviewing activist Latinx youth in emergent Latinx communities across the United States; and an experimental documentary on the geography of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona in collaboration with their mother Vanessa Acosta. Born somewhere between here and Diriamba, Nicaragua, they were raised in the Huntington Park and Highland Park neighborhoods of Los Angeles and across the West Coast and Mexico; they’ve called California home for a significant part of their life. Tatiana now lives in a rent controlled apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Jasper Bernes is author of a scholarly book, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, 2017), and two books of poetry, Starsdown (2007) and We Are Nothing and So Can You (2015). Essays, poems and other writings can be found in Critical Inquiry,Modern Language Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, Endnotes, Lana Turner, The American Reader, and elsewhere. Together with Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, he edits Commune Editions. He lives in Berkeley with his family.
Gretchen Frances Bennett’s (American, b. 1960, Portland, Oregon) recent projects include a solo exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2019); the exhibitions Becoming American, San Juan Island, WA (2018); Fire in the Mountains, Jackson, WY (2018); and The Rough Draft of Everything, Bridge Productions, Seattle, WA (2017). She has read her writing at the Holiday Forever Gallery, Jackson, WY (2017) and as part of the series This Might Not Work at INCA, Seattle, WA (2016). In 2014, Bennett received the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award and completed postgraduate work at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is presently at work on her first collection of essays.
Dave Kennedy’s works have been published globally in such magazines as Art21 and Numéro Cinq and exhibited both locally and internationally at such venues as the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, Photo Center Northwest, Bellevue Arts Museum, Zhou B Art Center, Chicago Industrial Arts & Design Center, Escuela de Belle Arte in Spain, Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum’s Gallery.
Represented by Bridge Productions in Seattle, WA, Kennedy is a recipient of a Yaddo Residency and Fellowship, 4Culture Individual Project Award, as well as, Artist Trust’s Grants for Artists Projects, the Joanne Bailey Wilson Endowed Scholarship, and the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. He has presented multimedia presentations to the Society of Photographic Educators, Cornish College of the Arts, and the University of Washington on topics of marginalization and objectification. He received his MFA from the University of Washington in Interdisciplinary Arts and an undergraduate degree from Western Washington University in Visual Communication. Kennedy is currently working as an adjunct professor at Photo Center Northwest while keeping a full time studio practice in Seattle, WA.
