Natalie Diaz
Natalie Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave American poet, language activist, former professional basketball player, and educator who was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. Her books include, Postcolonial Love Poem and When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award. She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a USA fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship. She is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community and identifies as Akimel O'odham. She is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she teaches in the MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Phoenix. @ndinn
Image credit: MacArthur Foundation
Ava Fedorov
Ava Fedorov is a Boston-based visual artist and writer who explores the overlaid arrangements of life that comprise landscape as it transforms due to climate cataclysm. With a background that includes design and film, she pulls from all realms of her creative knowledge to portray disappearing wilderness, haunted geographies, and the implicit nexus that connects internal and external landscapes. She creates large, abstract paintings, multimedia installations, and global performance pieces. Ava’s work has been exhibited, collected, and published internationally and her short fiction has been a finalist for the Pushcart Prize and the PEN America award for debut fiction. Ava teaches Studio Foundations at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is also the founder and president of CICADA (cicadaartists.org), an organization committed to amplifying the creative response to environmental justice and the climate crisis. @avaglows
Ohara Hale
Ohara Hale is a self-taught artist who works with many different forms and materials. She sings, writes, draws, and performs sounds, words, colors, and movements that are questions and ideas about love, life, nature, and all the unseen, unknown, and dreamed in between. She currently resides on a tiny heart shaped volcano off the coast of Africa. @oharahale
Roland Longstreet
Roland Longstreet is a painter and sculptor based in Honolulu, Hawaii. He graduated from University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa with a Bachelors in Art with a focus on painting and sculpture and a minor in Chinese. In 2016 he helped open ARS Cafe, where under the guidance of John Koga and Lawrence Seward, he helped curate monthly art and music programs with a commitment to supporting the creative community in Honolulu. In 2020, Longstreet was the inaugural artist-in-residence through Honolulu’s Single Double Chinatown residency program, run by John Esguerra and Justin Nakasone. His work is focused on exploring the medium in search of connectivity and overlap with the supernatural. The anonymous individual becomes representative of the collective, depicting internal reflections of transformation. @shartnoggin
Image credit: Mark Kushimi
Nakemiah (Kiki) Williams
Nakemiah (Kiki) Williams is a Polaroid artist whose work involves destroying Polaroids by burning, cooking, ripping, or scratching the image—or, in the case of this exhibition, incorporating foraged organic materials such as mosses, flowers, and leaves. She then scans the Polaroids to make large prints, showing fine details of the damage and material intervention. This deconstructive and transformative process gives visual language for the emotional effects of trauma she endured while serving in the US Army. Her work has been included in group exhibitions “No Shame in My Game” at Arts Unbound (New Jersey), “Time Zero and Beyond: Instant Photography” at Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts (Rhode Island), “Person/Persona”, ARS Cafe (Hawai‘i), Honolulu Printmakers 92nd Annual Exhibition (Hawai‘i), "Annual Girl Group Show", Treehouse (Hawai‘i) and “Up Close & Personal at Trolley Barn Gallery (NewYork). Her art was showcased in FLUX Hawai‘i Magazine in 2020. Williams completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in the spring of 2020 at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and currently lives in Washington State. @nakemiahwilliams.nw