About the Contributors
BAEVY is an experimental artist based in Tucson, AZ, although she often wonders if her home is in another space. She is concerned with the micro and macro within our universe, how they inform each other, and how they are all encompassing and hold the same space and weight at once. Her voice is influenced by inner dialogue. She is interested in being a truthful voice, perhaps at the expense of likeability. To view more of her work, visit http://www.baevy.love/.
Dmitry Borshch was born in Dnipropetrovsk, studied in Moscow, today lives in New York. His works have been exhibited at Russian American Cultural Center (New York), HIAS (New York), Consulate General of the Russian Federation (New York), Lydia Schukina Institute of Psychology (Moscow), Contemporary Art Centers (Voronezh, Almaty), Museums of Contemporary Art (Poltava, Lviv). In 1989 he was accepted by the US as a political refugee from the USSR and, since February of last year, a refugee again, fleeing the war from Dnipropetrovsk to New York.
María DeGuzmán is a scholar, conceptual photographer, writer, and music composer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA, USA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC, USA) among other places. She has published photo-text work in many journals.
Christine De Vuono is a multimedia artist working with drawing, sculpture, collage, installation, and photography. The materials of each project are chosen specifically to engage viewers in new ways to examine societal norms and values. Her work utilises antiquated practices and mindful labour, emphasising the disparity between past traditions and present efficiencies. Often focusing on the transitions we face in life, her work celebrates the needs of the psyche for beloved care and lived beauty. De Vuono’s work was a finalist in the Salt Spring National Art Prize, British Columbia, and has been shown in London, UK, the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, Toronto, Ottawa, in her home town of Guelph, and in online forums. She completed a Bachelors of Arts (With Distinction) in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Waterloo.
Alison Fradkin’s work has been published in Synkroniciti, Voyage, Chaotic Merge, Continue the Voice, Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, Flash 405, Fterota Logia, ImageOutWrite, Femme Problems, Pastel Serenity, Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, Sapphic Writers Collective, Slamming Bricks (Western Colorado Writers' Forum), and Descendants of Medusa (Nymeria Publishing); and is forthcoming in New Plains Review and The Emblazoned Soul, as well as the anthologies Framework of the Human Body (Bell Press), Tyranny Unchained: Women's Freedom (International Human Rights Art Festival), Audacious Women (Hot Redhead Media), and Women's Sovereignty and Body Autonomy Beyond Roe v. Wade (Girl God Books). An enthusiast of inclusivity and accessibility, she freelances for her hometown of Chicago as Co-Artistic Director and Literary Manager of Violet Surprise Theatre, curating new works by queer playwrights; and as Dramatist for Special Gifts Theatre, adapting scripts for actors of all abilities.
Laura Gelsomini has worked as a professor of two-dimensional arts media for over 20 years. She has also worked in a traditional feminist collaborative pairing with artist Susan Duby. Some of their pieces are worked on simultaneously, intentionally blurring the notion of author and thus, ego. Their 20-year age difference has broadened their perspectives and reaffirmed that feminist considerations have remained rather constant across time. Laura's work has been exhibited in Ceres Gallery in New York City. Her work was also featured in F*ck U! In the Most Loving Way, exhibit produced by the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art, conceived to revisit the content of 1972’s landmark installation, Womanhouse.
Liss LaFleur is an Associate Professor of New Media Art at the University of North Texas. She is the Director of the Future Feminist Lab and an affiliated faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies and LGBTQ Studies. Her teaching and research foreground women’s histories, social computing, embodied technologies, and the politics of visibility. She is the recipient of a John F. Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellowship and a Mellon Foundation Immersive Scholar grant. Her multimodal projects have been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her digital humanities scholarship is archived in the #MeToo Digital Media Collection at Harvard University.
Dr. Jocelyn E. Marshall is affiliated faculty in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College. Their research focuses on contemporary U.S.-based diasporic women and LGBTQ+ artists and writers, researching the relationships between intertextual practice, displaced positionality, and traumatic experience. She currently co-edits the Feminist Interview Project at Art Journal Open and co-chairs the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Gender and Feminisms Caucus Board. Their critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of American Culture, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Public Art Dialogue, Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, and elsewhere. Her most recent book project was a co-edited collection on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: Addressing Gender-based Violence in the Classroom (Emerald Publishing, 2022).
Debadrita Saha (She/her) completed her postgraduate education in English Literature at Presidency University in Kolkata and works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of English and Literary Studies, Brainware University, Kolkata. Her field of interests include postcolonial studies, literatures in translation, critical race theory, caste and gender studies, ecofeminism, contemporary politics, art and cinema At present, she researches at People’s Archive of Rural India, a multimedia journalistic platform that records an authentic picture of non-urban India, and contributes to the library of non-canonical literature at Decolonizing our Bookshelves, a non-profit virtual organisation which aims to bring voices of socially marginalised literati to the fore. As a member of UnCaNi (The University of Cambridge Nationalisms & Identities Research Group), she contributes to research on racial and gender identities.
Carisa Showden is a scholar who writes and works at the intersection of feminist and queer theories. Previous pieces created with María DeGuzmán have appeared in online journals such as I Don’t Do Boxes: Queer Stories from the South and The Dillydoun Review and juried shows including Truth to Power at the Pleiades Gallery in Durham, NC and City of Tiny Lights at the Salisbury University Art Galleries, Salisbury, MD.
Katherine Sobering is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas and an affiliated faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research, which has been supported by the Fulbright Commission and the National Science Foundation, examines questions at the intersection of gender, labor, and politics, with an attention to how people resist inequality in the U.S. and Latin America. Her recent book, The People’s Hotel: Working for Justice in Argentina, was published with Duke University Press. Her work has also appeared in Social Problems, Work and Occupations, and Socio-Economic Review and with Oxford University Press and the University of Texas Press.
Kini Sosa is a teaching artist and poet from San Diego, CA. A current Creative Writing MFA student at the California Institute of the Arts, she also holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside. She has previously taught at the UVA Young Writers Workshop and the Inlandia Institute’s Poetry is Power Teen Institute. Their work can be found in the Mosaic Arts Literary Magazine, Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing, and Creating Comics, and other publications.
Annie Sprinkle toured one-woman theater pieces, including Post Porn Modernist and Hardcore from the Heart, from 1989 to 2003 to 21 countries. Before bridging into the art world, Sprinkle was a sex worker and made adult films. The people she met along the way shaped her involvement in social justice, human rights, and freedom of expression, and she remains avidly committed to these ideals. Awards include Performance Studies International Artist/Activist/Scholar Award, a Eureka Fellowship from Fleishhacker Foundation, and three San Francisco Arts Commission grants. In 2002, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens fell in love and have worked together collaboratively ever since, doing visual art, performance, theater, and happenings. They launched the Ecosex Movement (2008) from their home base in San Francisco and have been doing art experiments to make environmental activism more fun and diverse. Career highlights include Wedding to the Sea at the Venice Biennale, being documenta 14 artists, and a screening of their documentary film Water Makes Us Wet at NY MoMA. They received a Guggenheim Grant in 2021 for their current film project, Playing with Fire. Their book Assuming the Ecosexual Position—Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) chronicles their art/life adventures.Find more of their work at sprinklestephens.org.
Beth Stephens is an artist and filmmaker with a Ph.D. in Performance Studies. She grew up in Appalachia, which has had a lasting influence on her work. After making visual and performance art about queer identity during the nineties culture wars, Stephens left New York for a professorship at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Stephens produced and directed her first feature documentary, Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story, in 2014. In 2002, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle fell in love and have worked together collaboratively ever since, doing visual art, performance, theater, and happenings. They launched the Ecosex Movement (2008) from their home base in San Francisco and have been doing art experiments to make environmental activism more fun and diverse. Career highlights include Wedding to the Sea at the Venice Biennale, being documenta 14 artists, and a screening of their documentary film Water Makes Us Wet at NY MoMA. They received a Guggenheim Grant in 2021 for their current film project, Playing with Fire. Their book Assuming the Ecosexual Position—Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) chronicles their art/life adventures.Find more of their work at sprinklestephens.org.
Gail Thacker, espousing her “life as art philosophy,” continues building a photographic diary about her experiences and people within the artistic LGBT community. Thacker runs the Gene Frankel Theater in New York City, where she continues to work as a visual artist using theatre and life as art. Her Polaroid work is a part of several collections, including The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, CT), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA), The Museum of the City of New York (NYC), The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (NYC), and el Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Spain). Thacker’s work has also been featured in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Between the Sun and the Moon Gail Thacker’s Polaroids (City University of New York), The Polaroid Book (Taschen), Tabboo! The Art of Stephen Tashjian (Damiani), There Was A Sense of Family: The Friends of Mark Morrisroe (Moderne Kunst Nürnbergsa), and elsewhere.
Conrad Ventur is a multimedia artist and horticulturist based in New York City. His work, which encompasses photography, video, and independent publication projects, considers ecology, family, habitat, and memory. Ventur studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology (BFA, 1999) and fine art at Goldsmiths, University of London (MFA, 2008). His work is held in the permanent collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Wadsworth Atheneum, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.
Tahmidal Zami is the Executive Editor of Bengal History Collective (Behika). His work mainly focuses on early modern and colonial Bengal. His published research covered issues including Bengali literature, Sufism, Christianity, and gender and sexuality. His essay, “Interreligious Encounter and Proselytism in Pre-Mughal Bengal: An Analysis of the Report by the Jesuit Father Nicolas Pimenta” co-authored with Carola Erika Lorea has been published by the Indian Historical Review. His book chapter contribution to the volume II of History of Bangladesh, titled, “Vernacular Sufism in Bengal (1500-1800 CE)” can be read here: https://www.academia.edu/44968006/Vernacular_Sufism_in_Bengal_1500_1800_CE_.
