Maria Silk (she/her) is an artist and writer based in San Francisco. She is known as a very good sport.

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Photo: Robbie Sweeny

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Sloka Krishnan is a San Francisco-based playwright-lyricist interested in magic, extravagance, ritual, camp, and the disavowal of moral purity and coherent identity. His writing has been described as subversive, multilayered, and eviscerating (by a boy he once slept with) and as darkly surreal comedy (by a legitimate online publication). He is currently a 2024-2025 Resident Playwright with Playwrights Foundation and was previously a 2020 recipient of  an Artist Project Grant from the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of  Cultural Affairs, a 2017-2018 Horizon Theatre Playwright Apprentice (Atlanta, GA), and a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow in Playwriting. His work has been developed and performed by Cutting Ball Theatre, Playwrights Foundation, and the UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (San Francisco Bay Area); Happy Accident Theatre, Horizon Theatre Company, Out Front Theatre, and Working Title Playwrights (Atlanta); Forum Theatre and the Rainbow Theatre Project (DC). Sloka’s play The Bugs is available in the Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays Volume 2.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. His performance novel The Nancy Reagan Collection (Futurepoem) made the New York Public Library’s Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020, LitHub’s 65 Favorite Books of 2020, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. Crandall has received fellowships and grants from MacDowell, Yaddo, The Poetry Project, The Lambda Literary Foundation, and Onassis USA. He is a poetry editor at FENCE and the Director of Small Press Traffic.

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Photo: Chupan Atashi

A self-taught artist, Craig Calderwood’s intricate and decorative works are rendered through a personal vernacular of symbols and patterns. Recalling the private languages that underground communities of queer and trans people used for safety for decades, Calderwood develops these patterns and symbols though research into history, personal narratives, and pop cultural moments. They then arrange them into constellations to tell stories both personal and fantasized.

Utilizing low-end materials like fabric paint, polymer clay, found fabrics and fibre tip pens, Calderwood explores ideas around desire, biodiversity, and otherness. They also look at how material practice forms its own language for safe and coded communication within hostile environments.

Flexing the intended use of their mediums, Calderwood’s work moves through the material ideologies of painting, drawing, and textile, to form images whose lines and textures teeter between thread and paint, blurring not just the binaries of their materials, but of their subjects.

Styles Alexander (they/them) is an Afro-Indigenous transdisciplinary artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Styles graduated from the Boston Conservatory At Berklee, where they received a BFA in Contemporary Performance and Choreography. While attending the Boston Conservatory, Styles performed and collaborated in creative processes with choreographers such as Andrea Miller, Robert Moses,Dwight Rhoden, Doug Varone and others. Styles has collaborated with artists including Maurya Kerr, Robin Aren, Joy Davis, and many others. Styles’s choreographic work is a practice of reimagining and communicating with history through speculative future-crafting, hauntological investigation, ancestral mediumship, and their own punk epistemology. Styles’s work has been featured in Urbanity NeXt, DougVarone’s DEVICES program, Jess Curtis’ Gravity PPP, ROT Festival, and the SENSEOBJECT residency. In 2023 Styles was a DanceWebImpulstanz Scholarship recipient, under the mentorship of Clara Furey and Lara Kramer. Styles is currently a recipient of the Zellerbach Family Foundation award and Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s NEW award for the creation of their new work TarNation – premiering Summer 2026.

Mike Chin has worked in puppetry and theater-making since 2016. From 2018-2020 he worked as a regular puppeteer and fabricator for Carrie Morris Arts Production (now the Detroit Puppet Company), including as co-lead artist for The Weight of Air on A Body, which was awarded a 2019 MAP Fund grant. In 2021 and 2022, Chin worked with Hope Mohr and Maxe Crandall on video and live adaptations of the Bacchae, for which he created puppet sequences. The film, Before Bacchae Before, was an official selection of the 2021 San Francisco Transgender Film festival. When not puppeteering, Chin is a Professor of Classics at UC Davis and is currently working on a new research and multimedia project, Diocletian: A Reckless Autobiography, and, with Hope Mohr, a new immersive theater ritual, Forget/Remember: The Dream Oracle of Trophonius.

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Gabriele Christian is a San Francisco-based movement artist, director, curator, dramaturg, and descendent of stolen folk. Experimenting within somatic practices, language, performance composition, video production and community arts facilitation, they locate and center BlaQ (Black and Queer) experience, vernacular, and aesthetics as wellsprings for radical futurity. They perform original work and collaborate trans- and inter-nationally, most recently in Berlin, New York City, Vienna, and Amsterdam. They are a founding member of multiple Bay Area born performance collectives and land projects including: RUPTURE; OYSTERKNIFE; LXS DXS; and BlaQyard. As co-director of OYSTERKNIFE, they were granted a competitive Creative Work Fund grant and a special citation Izzie Award for mouf//full, presented at Grace Cathedral in 2024. They currently serve as Executive Director and Co-Artistic Director of Jess Curtis/Gravity, a body-based arts and accessibility non-profit living on in the wake of Jess Curtis’ transition in March 2024. At the heart of all their work: exhaustive research into belonging, spirit, and desirability while living in the fangs of dehumanizing times.

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Photo credit: Alexa "LexMex" Trevino, 2025

Kota Ezawa is a Japanese-German American visual artist. Ezawa visually transforms imagery he mines from the news, the history of art, photography, film, and popular culture in his acclaimed video animations, lightboxes, murals, sculptures, watercolors, and other artworks. His process of translating primarily charged depictions – court proceedings from the OJ Simpson trial, footage of NFL players kneeling in protest during the National Anthem, artworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, or iconic images from the history of photography, for example – from one visual form to another, is an inquiry for the artist and viewer alike, into our cultural consciousness shaped by images.

Kota Ezawa’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, CA; SITE Santa Fe, NM; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; and Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, Canada. Ezawa participated in the Whitney Biennial in 2019 and the Shanghai Biennale in 2004. His work is in the collections of institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects.

Ibarra’s work has been featured at The Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC), ONE Archives (LA) and Anderson Collection (Stanford) to name a few.  She is a recipient of the UC President’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program and a Eureka Fellowship. She has received the Creative Capital Award, the Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, the Art Matters Grant, the Eisner Film and Video Prize, the Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award among others. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, ArtNews and in various academic journals and books nationally and internationally.

As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within feminist anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE! and Survived and Punished, both national feminist of color organizations dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. As a lecturer, Ibarra has taught Ethnic Studies, Sexuality Studies, Art Practice/Studio and History and Theory of Contemporary Art courses at various Universities. Past adjunct and part-time teaching posts have included: Stanford University, UC Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, and California College of the Arts.  Ibarra holds an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and attended the PostColonial Studies program held at the Universidat Rovira | Virgili (Spain). She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kevin Lo is a composer, choreographer, writer, and artist living on Chochenyo Ohlone land. In his compositions and improvisations for live performance and installation, he utilizes instruments, digital sound processing and generative programming environments to examine spatial and auditory sensitivities, topological structure and audience kinesthetic response while seeking to corrupt conventional compositional/performative/installative rationale. Alongside being SPT's event tech, he's also one of eight co-curators for a weekly reading series in Oakland. Work has been published in Eyelet Press and elsewhere. Kevin freelances in the arts, performs nationally and abroad.

Monte Marin (fka as aka stefa marin alarcon) is a genderless, genreless vocalist, composer and multi-media performance artist born and raised in Queens, NY. Using an amalgamation of punk, experimental rage pop, and classical minimalism with queer maximalist aesthetics, stefa builds sonic and visual worlds that offer a somatic decolonial respite for the misfits, the displaced, and future generations of brown and Indigenous radical artists of the diaspora. Their ritual opera performance film Born With An Extra Rib won the 2022 Queer|Art Recent Work Prize, a 2023 TRANSlations Seattle Film Festival Jury Award and 2025 Best Experimental Short at QueerCine International Film Festival. Their debut EP Sepalina (“gorgeous and hypnotic” - NPR) was released on Figure & Ground Records followed by their full length album Born With An Extra Rib in 2024. They are a current MFA Art Practice candidate at Stanford University.  

@mmmontemar

Cornelius O is a conceptual artist working in poetics, choreography, image and objects. Their work trembles between genres and is densely implicitly queer (…stop asking), political (…stop asking), and reaches toward queer liberatory futures (…stop asking!). They started walking on stage on purpose at age 5, and by accident ever since.

They have made work in many places and with many people (you know who you are, stop asking).

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Cornelius O creates artworks for theaters, nightclubs, Drag bars, dance venues, museums, galleries, printed media, the internet and public and private spaces. They have been commissioned to present work in Zurich, Cork, Dublin, Stockholm, Malmö, Los Angeles, Portland, New York, Amsterdam, and Berlin. In 2008, Cornelius founded OX. Cornelius has held residencies at Tanzhaus (Zurich); MDT (Stockholm); Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin, CA); SOMArts (San Francisco); Konstnärsnämden (Stockholm), CounterPulse (San Francisco).

They regularly work with Amanda Apetrea (SE), Maria Silk (USA), Gabriele Christian (USA), Ruairí Ó Donnabháin (IR).

They have a show for kitchen tables that's on tour- you want a show at your house?

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Sam Sax is the author of the novel YR Dead (longlisted for The National Book Award) and the poetry collections PIG (Best book of 2023 Vulture and Electric Lit), Bury It (Winner of the James Laughlin Award), and Madness (Winner of the National Poetry Series). They're the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion and teach in an interdisciplinary arts program at Stanford University.

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Amelia Bande is an artist, writer and performer from Chile living in the US. She uses text and visuals to create live capsules of intimacy and low-fi musicals. Her solo and collaborative work has been shown at Artists Space, The Poetry Project, Storm King Arts Center, Participant Inc., BOFFO Performance Festival, EFA Project Space, Teatro Nacional de Chile, Teatro Sidarte and more. She's been an artist in residence at Shandaken Projects, Yaddo, Fire Island Artist Residency, Human Resources and MacDowell. She was co-editor of Critical Correspondence, a performance focused online publication of Movement Research. Her plays Chueca and Partir y Renunciar were published in a Spanish-English bilingual edition by Sangría Editora in 2012. Belladonna Collaborative released her 2017 chapbook “The Clothes We Wear.” A sound archive of her early performances was released by Infinito Audio in Chile. Amelia was a mentor for the 2024-25 Poetry Project's Emerge-Be-Surface program and is currently a Writer in Residence at NYU's Spanish and Portuguese Department.

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Photo: Rachel Higgins

Wren Farrell is a writer, producer, and journalist living in San Francisco.

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Brittany Newell is a writer and performer living in San Francisco. Her debut novel Oola was published in 2017 at the age of 21 in the US, UK, and Germany. You can find her written work in Granta, N+1, The New York Times, McSweeney's, and others. Her second novel Soft Core was published by Farrard, Straus & Giroux in February 2025 in the US, UK, and France. She is currently at work on a third novel about love addiction, emotional vampires, and cannibalism.

Brontez Purnell is the author of 7 books, including 100 Boyfriends, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, was long-listed for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and was named an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Tennessee Williams Award for Fiction and the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award for Risk Taking In Art, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the front man for the band the Younger Lovers and a renowned performance artist and zine-maker. He holds an MFA in Art from the University of California in Berkeley. Born in Triana, Alabama, he has lived and made art in Oakland, California, for two decades.

Rowena Richie moved to San Francisco in the early 90s during the height of the rave scene. After graduating with a BFA in dance from Long Beach State, Rowena found her chosen dance family in San Francisco. She was a founding member of the Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project, and continues working with Erika and Ryan Tacata as co-lead artists of For You productions. Rowena is a frequent guest editor for the publication In Dance; a Global Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health; a fitness and fall prevention instructor for Always Active; a Quality of Life Engagement Specialist for Sage Eldercare Solutions; and most recently, a co-host of the podcast No Left Field. Rowena earned an MFA in Creative Inquiry from New College of California. Long-term rent control has made it possible for her to stay and continue making art in SF. 

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Photo: Kegan Marling

Ryan Tacata is a performance maker based in Vancouver, BC. He is co-artistic director of the performance group For You and Assistant Professor of Performance at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University. His work has been presented at the Asian Art Museum, Stanford University, the City of Chicago, Court Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and The Momentary.

Julie Tolentino (she/they interchangeably) is a Filipino Salvadoran interdisciplinary artist. Tolentino is a contributing artist with Commonwealth and Council, an ICA LA Artist In Residence 2025-6, a 2026 Queer Art Mentor, 2025-6 FCA Creative Researcher, two-time MacDowell Fellow, and recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, and Program Co-Director and Regular Faculty in the School of Art at CalArts. They live and work between Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, CA.

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Syd Gavela is an interdisciplinary writer, scholar, and artist living on the unceded, ancestral land of the Lisjan Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people. They recently graduated with honors from Stanford University in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a minor in Digital Humanities. Syd is a Production Assistant for Small Press Traffic, an educator, and freelancer in the arts.