Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over fifty performance artworks worldwide including Black Weirdo School (Pop Up Critique) (2023), the déjà vu—live (2022) and Jupiter (2021). Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), (ghost gestures) (2021), and the déjà vu (2022.) Her writing has also appeared in New Daughters of Africa, Bone Bouquet, Poem-a-Day, Tripwire, Kitchen Table Translation, Migrating Pedagogies and Experiments in Joy: a Workbook. A 2023 Performance Fellow at the Franconia Sculpture Park, she earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays that remix narratives from film, literature and visual art to zoom in on the Black presences within them. She co-founded/edited The Encyclopedia Project, a three-volume, cross-referenced journal of literature and visual art, and, with writer Ernest Hardy, she presented The Black Book, a multi-volume visual mixtape and love letter to Black people and Black culture, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. A contributor to the year-long Radio Imagination event series celebrating science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, Bryant has performed live film essays about Blade Runner, Regency House Party, Under the Cherry Moon, L’Eclisse, and Femme Noire, her original film montage focused on Black women as sexual/moral tropes. Her next book, Residual, a meditation on grief, desire and archival research, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. As a lifetime coastal city resident, Bryant is currently enjoying a Midwest adventure as Assistant Professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she is a member of the Film Scene African Diaspora Committee. She lives in Iowa City. Photo Credit: Paul Sepuya