Livia Glascock is a digital artist that enjoys experimenting with video, sculpture, poetry, and sound. She looks to explore ideas such as collective memory, biological remembrance, and generational trauma through animation and collage. She hopes that her art evokes emotions that remind us of moments where we feel our humanity deep in our bones.

Ariana Simpson is an experimental poet and writer, and wannabe zine queen. While not from the literal bayou, the self-proclaimed “swamp baby” hails from Louisiana and is Florida raised. She received her B.A. in English Language and Literature from Rollins College where she also studied sociology and music. She has been published in various zines and lit journals, including Burrow Press’ BP Review. Ariana first seriously experimented with video poetry in 2023 for Cadence Video Poetry Festival, becoming the recipient of the Video by Poets Award. Often feeling like an amalgamation disintegrating onto paper in the form of hushed rhythms, exploring poetry through a convergence of visual and audio forms has both fragmented and stretched her out in galvanizing ways. Ariana writes poetry knowing poetry as many manifestos, as textured confession, as salve.

With the goal of creating something that starts the process of healing, Kamari Bright is a multidisciplinary artist with works that have been received across the US, Greece, France, Mexico, Germany, & Canada. The 2023 Bainbridge Island Museum of Art BRAVA Emerging Artist is currently working on a manuscript connecting the influence of Christian folklore on present-day misogyny, and a videopoem extrapolating collective trauma and its connection to land stewardship.

Photo credit: J Rycheal

Natachi Mez seeks to nourish. She is a writer, performer, teaching artist, and emcee born and based in Sacramento, California. Through improvisation, call & response, and collective breathing, Natachi facilitates dynamic experiences that deepen audience engagement and celebrate community voice. Natachi works as a Business Program Manager, focusing on community building, communications, intercultural awareness, and design, and is almost always ready to hop into a dance circle.

Rana San is an intermedia artist, curator, and night dreamer pondering language and lineage, intimacy and interdependence. Her creative and curatorial practice centers experimental and analog approaches to storytelling through film, writing, and movement presented on screen and stage. Based between Seattle and Istanbul, she co-directs Cadence Video Poetry Festival and is a co-curator of Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time-Based Disturbances. Rana has recently presented work at Engauge Experimental Film Festival (WA), Experiments in Cinema (NM), and Helios Sun Poetry Film Festival (MX).

Hannah Villanueva  is a visual artist specializing in photography and videography. She began her journey in the arts when she picked up a camera in her teens, and started to shoot ephemeral portraits, nature landscapes, and content for brands and magazines. She soon found a love for film and has worked in an array of roles as a cinematographer, director, writer, producer, and editor.

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is an author, filmmaker, and curator exploring the liminal spaces of the literary arts. Her interest in how words are experienced has resulted in gallery installations, classical music performances, broadsides, karaoke, and video poetry. She is co-director of Cadence Video Poetry Festival, co-curator of Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time-Based Disturbances (The 3rd Thing), and a community board member for the Seattle City of Literature. Chelsea was recently published in Tri-Quarterly and featured in Local Sightings Film Festival (WA), Aorta Poetry Film Festival (NZ), and Festival Fotogenia (MX).

jade wong is an artist, filmmaker, production designer, and restaurant worker. Their practice moves through experimental documentary, performance, object-making, and sound to explore the revelatory and healing potential of the senses.

Fatma Belkıs was born in Antalya in 1985. She now lives in İstanbul. She is interested in narratives of individuals going through a transformation, specifically the ones who prefer not to do this alone. She works with text, video, and printed matter. While problematizing structures built on friendship and comradery, she focuses on contracts and the breaches of these contracts regarding these structures. She aims to weave a web tying notions like loss, grief, negotiation, conflict, digestion, disappointment, and failure. She finds marshes fascinating and she thinks cats are ideal roommates.

Her works were shown in İstanbul and Sharjah Biennials and in institutions such as İstanbul Modern, DEPO, nGbK, Tensta Konsthall. The films she directed were shown at international film festivals in Turkey and Europe.

Kamila Kuc is a Polish-born, London-based filmmaker, whose hybrid practice stems from the belief that although we are unable to change our pasts, we have the power to shape our future narratives. Informed by her own lived experience, she sees moving image as a portal to ourselves and our shared experience as we inhabit different moments of collective presence. She utilizes empathy as form of resistance. Kamila employs methods of narrative psychology, speculative histories, memories and dreams to subvert dominant narratives of history and create new points of reference for the future. Set within the realm of social choreography, her work considers complex ways to relate to one another through embodied, trust-building practices that defy the traditional notion of authorship.

Livia Azevedo Lima (1989) is a multimedia editor and writer with a Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of São Paulo. She lives in Seattle. Alongside her editorial work, she curates the Travessias—Brazilian Film Festival at Northwest Film Forum and coordinates the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop.

Michael V. Smith‘s films have played in festivals around the world, including the Vancouver International Film Festival, the New York Video Festival, and the British Film Institute. Smith has won a number of awards for both his film work and his writing. Smith’s first feature documentary, The Floating Man, won Director’s Choice at the Cinema Diverse festival in Palm Springs. His short ‘I Dream a Queer Allegory,’ made with celebrated writer RM Vaughan before his death, won the Cadence Best Video by Poets Award in 2021. Smith has also won the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers and a Western Magazine Award for Fiction. His memoir, My Body Is Yours (Arsenal Pulp, 2015) was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award. Michael V. Smith is a Professor at UBC, Okanagan campus, where he teaches Creative Writing.

Photo credit: Jessica Zais Photography