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

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.

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

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

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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