Collective Directory
Yemi Seyi is a Yoruba-American artist, photojournalist, filmmaker and community archivist based in Pasadena, California. His photography and video work explore spatiality, in-betweenness, the politics of movement and collective memory. Yemi’s current project, No Get Enemy, a portrait based mapping of Afrodiasporic legacies in water-space attempts to re-place narratives about the Black body’s relationship to water. Since 2017, Yemi has documented the work of The Center for Restorative Justice, a non-profit dedicated to the dismantling of systems of white supremacy through racial justice education and place based learning. There he serves as the Director of Art + Narratives where he helps amplify the transformational stories from the community's many people, workshops, and racial justice pilgrimages. His community archival practice exists in conjunction with his work at The Center. Yemi is a self trained visual artist and has also studied at Art Center College of Design, and has a BA in Africana Studies from California State University, Northridge.
Taegen Meyer (they/she) is a Black-Chicana media artist, strategist, and organizational leader. She currently serves as the Managing Director of Chamber Arts, a project of Community Partners. As a self-described socio-technical engineer, she offers a unique approach to the engineering of socio-technical systems between arts and nonprofit worlds. She has delivered talks for numerous firms including EY West, SAMSHA, UC Irvine, and the MTV Entertainment Group.
Lenise "Harmony" Halley is a multifaceted wellness expert with a deep foundation in health and personal development. Harmony provides practical self-exploration exercises, helping people uncover their deepest desires and equipping them with tools to achieve a life of wealth, wellness, and harmony.
Irina Contreras is an LA based interdisciplinary artist, writer and cultural worker. Irina's community practice spans a commitment to restorative justice alongside supporting the infrastructures of alternative economic structures. Most of Irina's current time is spent caregiving a delightful young person and plotting the expansion of community work with other caregivers in their local community. As a youth, she became involved in the movement to decarcerate youth, girls and gender expansive community in LA and beyond. This work has been central to all facets of their life’s work. Irina’s' writing has appeared in various anthologies as well as being a regular contributor to several now defunct print magazines. Within their creative practice, Irina weaves speculative fiction, LA histories, dreams and camp as a way to more thoroughly examine the nuances of conflict and surveillance culture. Their performances and videos have been featured throughout the US, Mexico, the Caribbean and more.
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Helen Peña is a child of the Atlantic, filmmaker, and cultural programmer from Miami, FL. They create socially and politically engaged cinematic rituals centered around memory, mysticism and water bodies. Their work has screened in festivals across the country including Prismatic Ground, New Orleans Film Festival and Third Horizon Film Festival. In 2020, Helen participated in the UCLA Sanctuary Spaces Residency, where they worked on their first short film, WHEN ANGELS SPEAK OF LOVE, which screened on PBS South Florida. In 2023, their short film IRRESISTIBLE was selected as a finalist for the New Orleans Film Society South Pitch and The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant. In 2017, Helen co-founded (F)empower, a collective of queer feminist artist-activists. Their films and culture work have been showcased at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, the Norton Museum of Art, ICA Miami and more.
Gerardo "Gerry" Maravilla is a Mexican-American writer/director based in Los Angeles. Born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, he escaped his suburban Catholic upbringing through punk rock and horror movies. A bicultural lovechild of Tim Burton and Guillermo del Toro, he crafts supernatural horror stories with heart.
He's been a Film Independent Project Involve Writing Fellow, a New York Film Festival Artist Academy Fellow, and a Latino Film Institute Inclusion Fellow. He also developed his work through Hola Mexico’s Tomorrow’s Filmmakers Today, the Mexican-American Cultural Education Foundation's Masterclass, and the Stowe Story Labs.
His films have screened at Palm Springs ShortFest, the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF), and Bogo Shorts, among others.
His feature script, Niño de Vidrio (Child of Glass), was developed at Cine Qua Non’s Storylines Lab and participated in their Script Revision Lab. The short version won the Roadmap Writers Short Script Competition, and the feature recently won the BendFilm Basecamp Pitch Competition.
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Jade Phoenix is a Queer, Trans, Filipinx, Genre Non-Conforming artist, and 1:1 creative guide for liberation art.
Jade’s work is a poetic expression rooted in the multiple identities she holds and how they intersect with her day-to-day fight for liberation. Over the last two decades, Jade's work has been featured on stages, in theatres, venues and universities across the world in hopes of bringing queer and trans artists into a practice of sacred artistry towards collective liberation.
Alexander Catanzarite is an exploration and research-based artist, illustrator, sound designer, and poet living on Tongva land [Los Angeles, CA]. Through visual, written, and sonic worldbuilding they capture the diversity and pay homage to Black and indigenous bodies, lands, cultures, and spirits. They received their Bachelor of Arts from California State University Los Angeles where they focused on Pan African Studies and Fine Arts.
Their work is driven by themes of spiritual and physical connections, body movement, sexuality, community, and rebirth. The soundscapes they create are rooted in imagining and building vibrant and harmonious worlds through audio-visual storytelling. Catanzarite creates portals and vibrations; using history as a guide and planting seeds of timeless visions that influence the eternal present moment we exist in. Catanzarite uses food, music, poetry, sexuality, and radical acts of pleasure as fuel for art and manifestations of a reality that pushes back against the dominant and normalized culture of violence and apathy. They question and search for how we can fulfill our ability to feel, shift, change, and choose. How do we find kinship with each other; and deepen and pour into ourselves and the land we inhabit?
Catanzarite comes from a queer and Pan African worldview; recognizing how everything in the universe is connected to a single evershifting source, a web of intersecting memories and experiences that build off of, react to, and feed into one another.
LEO ALAS (b. 1995) is a contemporary multi-disciplinary artist exploring themes around care work and grief, through a Marxist-Feminist lens. Their practice moves through and along boundaries of intimacy, the body, and community sculpture. It takes on journeys into world building and Queer political imagination, exploring what is possible, what is potent, and what is beautiful, in an effort to find healing and joy in late-stage capitalism.
LEO was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. They studied Fine Arts and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and received their MFA in Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design in 2022. Leo is a co-founder of Queer Spa Network, a doula, and a bathing enthusiast.
Cedric Tai is an un-disciplinary artist / educator born in Detroit, currently in Los Angeles (Tongva/Chumash/Kizh land.) They think through sculpture, talking, writing, performance, games, and experimental exhibitions. Her work focuses on neurodivergent experience, labor, and politics. Tai has partnered with neuroscientists, academics from critical psychiatry, artist collectives, disability justice social media influencers, and somatic therapists to co-create accessible resources particularly around “mental health” and queer anti-capitalist liberation. Some of their work is set up systematically (coding/spreadsheets/workshops/repetition) so that they can focus on the spontaneous and experimental way she engages with the audience. Other works are like love letters, or are intentionally not efficient, wherein Tai comes to know someone or something through immersing herself in an intimate process.
Rraine Hanson is a Jamaican transdisciplinary artist who designs worlds through mixed media to tell stories centering the imaginations of queer and trans people of colour. He is a 2025 Sundance Institute Trans Possibilities Intensive fellow and was previously awarded the 2020 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant for his short film Mooncake. It has since been acquired by OTV and UCLA Film & Television's queer moving image archive. When he’s not experimenting with his own storytelling, he works on other productions helping art departments build a myriad of different worlds. The hands-on crafting experience informs the methodology behind all his personal creative endeavors. He has also curated for publications, exhibits and assisted film festival programming teams as a means to champion other unique, underrepresented makers.
Bianca Nozaki-Nasser is a Japanese-Lebanese-Syrian artist, educator, and founder of Practicing Futures, a community creative lab dedicated to reclaiming and reimagining the future. Bianca’s work is rooted in social practice and has spanned across immersive audio video installations, speculative objects, and community engagement programs. She invites collective wrecking and reckoning, exploring the tension between building new worlds and redecorating old ones.
Amber Salik is a Los Angeles–based artist and expressive arts therapist whose work explores identity, community, and creative healing. Working across mixed media, self-portraiture, documentary, and abstract photography, she investigates how emotion, memory, and embodiment shape personal and collective narratives. Amber’s practice invites viewers into moments of reflection and reclamation—where vulnerability becomes a bridge to connection. Rooted in storytelling and sensory experience, her work honors the ongoing process of becoming, offering space for both individual healing and communal belonging.
Rebekah (she/her) explores the inner and outer worlds of bodies through the lens of matriarchal narratives. Her work consists of a mix of found object, printmaking, textile, and installation artwork. She is also one of the Collective Organizers for the Level Ground Artist Collective. She spends her time listening to what artists require and desire, then practices the magical arts of emails and errands to make those things happen.
Sarika Sanyal (she/her) is an arts & culture and philanthropic strategist dedicated to empowering communities through the power of cultural impact. She has spent the last 12+ years stewarding LA based arts organizations in education, artist management, and fundraising operations. Currently serving as Senior Director at CCS Fundraising, Sarika partners with nonprofits to drive transformational change and foster sustainable practices that create lasting value.
Myles Markham, (he/him or they/them) is a queer and transgender Native Hawaiian/Japanese American born and raised in the Deep South. Myles has worked in LGBTQ+ advocacy across religious, non-profit, business, and education sectors for the last decade and currently works in documentary film as an impact producer and in nonprofit leadership as the Major Gifts Officer for the Ms.Foundation for Women.
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Sonia Guiñansaca (Kichwa-Kañari) is an award-winning poet and cultural strategist with 17 years of experience in movement and community organizing. A pioneer in undocumented youth activism, they co-founded major national advocacy organizations and artistic projects for undocumented writers. As a writer and performer, they create narrative poems on migration, queerness, and nostalgia, often collaborating with visual artists. They self-published their debut poetry book, "Nostalgia & Borders" (2016), which was recently translated into Kichwa and Spanish as "Nostalgia y Fronteras" by Severo Editorial. They co-edited the anthology, "Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices On Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings" (HarperCollins 2022). Sonia has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, Poetry Foundation, British Council, and Creative Time, featured in Interview Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Teen Vogue, Democracy Now!, and PBS. They’ve been invited to Colombia, Ecuador, London, Argentina, and Mexico to speak on migrant policy and artivism.
Charlene Modeste is a performing artist, storyteller and plant medicine advocate based in Los Angeles. An embodiment of her creative practice, her work sits at the intersection of radical self-acceptance, collective healing and whimsy.
She premiered and self-produced her autobiographical one-woman show, She’s About to POP! at the Hollywood Fringe Festival where she was the recipient of a 2025 Hollywood Fringe Festival Scholarship Award. In 2022, she was honored to receive a nomination for a Critics’ Choice Documentary Award for Best Narration for her work on the award-winning documentary, Riotsville, USA.
An optimist at heart, with an edifying belief in being one’s own champion, her work is a unique blend of advocacy through creative expression.
Faith “Aya” Umoh is an artist, creative director, and founder of Creative Aya. A Royal Shakespeare Company Fellow and Music Center LA Artist-in-Residence, she creates immersive experiences that alchemize storytelling, movement, and co-creation. Winner of the 2025 MIT Reality Hack XR Grand Prize and Black Public Media’s Immersive Pitch, her Rhythmic Wave merges time travel, dance, and living memory.
kyla carter is a Liberian artist living on Tongva land, working across craft, textiles, film, video installation, and performance to create the ecotone between us and our ancestors; forging new paths for myth-making. Like a root seeking soil that nurtures, their artistic explorations, rituals, and research grow from the deep earth of Black archival memory. Their practice is a reclamation of space—one that cultivates new ways of being, where bodies bend, crack open, and regenerate because they are nourished by the land and the ancestors who whisper through the trees. Their work is rooted in the exploration of Black liberation through kink/BDSM, where the centering of consent, play, shapeshifting, and the healing of trauma in the body meet the honoring of flesh and spirit.
Chance Sion-Raize Calloway is an award-winning filmmaker, showrunner, novelist, published poet, and musician known for the critically-acclaimed independent LGBTQIA+ multimedia Pretty Dudes franchise. A Black, disabled, queer, formerly unhoused veteran of the United States Air Force, Sion-Raize presents representation beyond its buzzword trappings, centering the systemically marginalized and historically minoritized in every story he creates and genre he explores.
yétúndé ọlágbajú, a Nigerian/Gullah-Geeche research-based artist, adorner, and cultural worker, lives on Kashia Pomo & Tataviam lands. Their work explores the interconnectedness of our familial, platonic, romantic, and ecological bonds as we confront the future together. Inspired by the vastness of the Black diaspora, they use sonic, sculptural, and collaborative practices to untangle possibilities after reckonings. ọlágbajú co-founded and is a member of numerous artist and practitioner-led collectives with liberatory values and visions. They are galvanized by communities’ time, space, and resources to envision, strategize, and action towards the futures we need. ọlágbajú holds an MFA from Mills College and has received awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and LACE Lightening Fund. Currently, they are the Founder + Director of àjìjà space, the Education and Public Programs Manager at Mendocino Art Center, and consult as a cultural organizing strategist and facilitator.
Shontel Horne is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer, and the founder of MAE The Third Production Company, working between Philadelphia and Los Angeles. She earned her B.A. in English and Film Production from Georgia State University, where she began building a multidisciplinary creative practice rooted in narrative.Before expanding into filmmaking, Shontel spent 12 years as a journalist, writing for publications including HuffPost, Modern Luxury, and Condé Nast Traveler. Her work has always centered people, place, and the stories that often go untold.
Chase Joynt is a non-fiction filmmaker and writer who works at the edges of genre. His documentary features THE NEST and STATE OF FIRSTS both premiered in 2025 at Hot Docs and Tribeca, respectively. His documentary feature, FRAMING AGNES, was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed NO ORDINARY MAN, which was presented at Cannes Docs as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, NO ORDINARY MAN has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” For the CW, Chase directed episodes of TWO SENTENCE HORROR STORIES which are now streaming on Netflix; his episode Elliot from Season 2 won a Telly Award for directing. He is the author of three books. His latest VANTAGE POINTS was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction and named a Best Book of the Year by CBC Books, The Walrus and Autostraddle.
Samantha Curley is an award-winning documentary film producer and creative entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. She is the Co-Founder of Level Ground, which is both a 501(c)3 nonprofit artist collective and a documentary production company. She’s produced hundreds of films, gallery shows, and multimedia projects across her career, all while bolstering collaboration, experimentation, and community with underrepresented artists. Her most recent film UNION won a Special Jury Award for “The Art of Change” at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. She also produced FRAMING AGNES which won the NEXT Innovator and Audience Awards at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary. She’s received a Cali Catalyst grant awarded to California changemakers whose bold actions are impacting the arts and culture sector, and a Cinema Eye Honors award for Outstanding Achievement in Production.