Gabriele Christian is a San Francisco-based conceptual artist 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, and BlaQyard. They currently serve as Co-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.

They’ve presented and collaborated internationally in multimedia productions and processes with choreographers, collectives and companies like jose e. abad/fugitivity labs, LXS DXS, Sherwood Chen, Lenora Lee Dance, SAMMAY, Flyaway Productions, Skywatchers (ABD Productions), Kim Ip, Cornelius Sigourney/OX Productions, Robert Woodruff, Joe Goode Performance Group, Jess Curtis/Gravity, WePlayers, Larkin Street Youth Services, Destiny Arts Center, et hella al. Along with this experience, they've empowered the work and stories of Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) folk, black and brown youth, Tenderloin residents, and LGBTQ+ elders. At the heart of all their work: exhaustive research into belonging, spirit, and desirability while living in the fangs of dehumanizing times.

Ruthie Dineen is a pianist, composer, bilingual teaching artist, and Licensed Clinical Social Worker. She grew up in the Bay Area; her mother’s family is Salvadoran and her fathers’ Irish-American. She has worked at East Bay Center for the Performing Arts since 2009 as both staff and faculty and believes strongly in the transformative power of the arts, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural artistic study and performance, and community-based arts towards racial justice.

Ruthie is a founding member and co-leader of two original music ensembles, Negative Press Project and RDL+, with whom she performs, tours, arranges, and composes regularly, as well as a member of Bay Area Latin group Bululú. From 2015-2019 RDL+ hosted the monthly series “Bay Area Bridges” at Studio Grand in Oakland, CA, where Dineen collaborated with different performing artists each month creating new works of art (including theater, music, dance, poetry, and visual art).

Ruthie has been involved in several community-driven initiatives, serving on the Executive, Sustainability, and Steering Committees of Healthy Contra Costa, and a member of the Invest in Youth Coalition in Richmond, and the planning group for the Blueprint to Prevent Interpersonal Violence in Contra Costa County. She is currently the Executive Director at East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, and is deeply committed to the expression of youth voice through the arts, while supporting a vibrant artist community.

ruthiedineen.com

Stephen Shafer Mazow, Executive Director at Z Space, is a writer, theater artist, fundraiser, and activist living in San Francisco and working in program development and strategic initiatives at the intersection of art, science, and social justice.

Prior to joining Z Space as Managing Director in 2018, Shafer was Senior Grants Manager at the Exploratorium and Director of Institutional Giving and Strategy at American Conservatory Theater. He serves on the Boards of the National Queer Theater and Theatre Bay Area. He leads the trans and gender-non-conforming advocacy and empathy project I.P.Freely; and has helped to establish space-sharing initiatives, community-based theater programs, and research and action initiatives to address gender equity in the non-profit theater field. He was a founding member of the gender-bending sketch comedy troupe This Side of Butch. Most recently, he has partnered with exhibit designers and educators to develop and lead a series of temporal experiences in public restrooms that uses participatory practice, immersive theater, and inquiry-based learning to extend awareness and understanding of issues people face when they don’t “look” like they belong to a space or a group.

Shafer holds a B.A. in English from Wellesley College and a M.F.A. in English and Creative Writing from Mills College and has focused professional and creative efforts on deepening understanding of gender, its complex intersections with other aspects of identity, and the implications of oversimplified binary categories.

Erika Oba is a composer, pianist/flutist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer she has written works for jazz ensembles, orchestra, chamber groups, dance, and theater. She has been commissioned by groups such as the Del Sol String Quartet, Fresno Philharmonic, Shotgun Players, and Sharp and Fine. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and performs with her own groups the Erika Oba Trio, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble. She has performed in a wide variety of ensembles with musicians including Meredith Monk, Peter Apfelbaum, Hitomi Oba, Lisa Mezzacappa, Jean Fineberg, Jon Jang, and Francis Wong. In addition to her own private teaching studio, she is a private jazz piano instructor for UC Berkeley’s Music Department and a resident music director with Berkeley Playhouse’s Youth Conservatory Program.

Past artistic projects include a collaboration with choreographer Sammay Dizon, through the Red Poppy Art House’s inaugural Crossover Residency program in 2016. She was also a performer fellow with Giant Steps Music Action Lab in 2017, during which she collaborated with an international group of musicians and recorded the album What If. In 2018, she was a composer fellow with the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music and worked with the Del String Quartet. She was a 2023-24 fellow in the inaugural cohort of the Asian Improv Arts Fellowship program.

As an artist, she is interested in exploring cultural practice in diaspora, performance as ritual, and music as a vehicle for exploring our relationships to our communities, histories, and biosphere. She received her BM in Jazz Piano Performance from Oberlin Conservatory and her MA in Music Composition from Mills College.

Nadhi Thekkek is the Artistic Director of Nava Dance Theatre, a bharatanatyam dance company based in San Francisco. Nadhi uses the south Indian dance form to navigate place, identity, and politics through the lens of her lived experience as a child of immigrants and an unapologetic South Asian, diasporic woman.

Nadhi’s work has been supported through New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Grant, Zellerbach Family Foundation Community Arts Grants, Dancers’ Group CA$H Grants, California Arts Council, CounterPulse, East Bay Community Foundation, CHIME by Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and others. Nadhi has performed at various venues; Scotiabank Dance Centre (Vancouver), La Mama Experimental Theatre Club (NYC), Dance Place (D.C.), and Southbank Center (London). She has also worked as a freelancer with Sujit Vaidya (Vancouver), Seeta Patel (London), Randee Paufve (Oakland).

She is currently touring Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies an exploration of the transnational paid and unpaid labor of South Asian women in the diaspora and Broken Seeds Still Grow, an exploration of ancestry and an examination of cultural othering during the 1947 Partition of British India, co-created by Nadhi and visual artist Rupy C. Tut. Other recent works include Unfiltered, a bharatanatyam work exploring the #metoo movement in collaboration with Rasika Kumar and Sahasra Sambamoorthi; Hamsa, a bharatanatyam and ballet collaboration with Graham Lustig, Artistic Director of the Oakland Ballet, and others.

Some of Nadhi’s artist initiatives include the Unrehearsed (Virtual) Artist Residency Program, where artists create art that challenges the status quo in South Asian dance and offer public events engaging the South Asian community in urgent social justice issues. She is one of the co-founders of Varnam Salon, a dance series highlighting traditional arts repertoire and local dance makers. Nadhi is on the board of the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) and serves as a co-chair of the WAA Hyphen + Asian affinity group.

Jon Tracy is the Artistic Director of Marin Shakespeare Company, where he leads artistic programing for the company and has spearheaded initiatives to open the Marin Shakespeare space for new theater development by local artists. He works internationally as an art and culture producer for theatre and film. A director, playwright, designer, educator, and facilitator, he has worked with such companies as SF Playhouse, Aurora Theatre Company, Magic Theatre, Marin Theatre Company, American Conservatory Theater, and the Napa, Marin, Carmel, Tahoe Shakespeare festivals. He is the recipient of awards from the Kennedy Center, North Bay Artys, Marquee Journalists, Ellys, Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, and Theatre Bay Area, and has also been honored with the Solano College Theatre Alumni Award. He is a grant recipient from Theatre Bay Area, Shotgun Players’ Bridging the Gap, SUI Generis, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He formerly held a five-year leadership position with TheatreFIRST commissioning and developing the work of over fifty playwrights. Jon is a current Company Member of both Shotgun Players and PlayGround, and a proud member of SDC, the union for stage directors and choreographers.

jontracyplays.com

Jenifer K Wofford is a San Francisco artist and educator whose work investigates hybridity, history, calamity and global culture, often with a humorous bent. She is also 1/3 of the Filipina-American artist trio M.O.B.

Her work has been exhibited at venues including SFMOMA, the Asian Art Museum, BAMPFA, Oakland Museum of California, YBCA, San Jose Museum of Art and Southern Exposure. She has also shown at Asia Society (Houston), Wing Luke Museum (Seattle), DePaul Museum (Chicago), Frieze (Los Angeles), Silverlens Galleries (Manila), and Osage Galleries (Hong Kong).

Wofford was a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree and a 2017 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her other awards include the Eureka Fellowship, the Murphy Fellowship, and grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Art Matters Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. She has also been artist-in-residence at Lucas Artist Residency (Saratoga), The Living Room (Philippines), Liguria Study Center (Italy) and KinoKino (Norway).

Wofford teaches in the Fine Arts and Philippine Studies programs of the University of San Francisco. She has also led courses at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Mills, SFAI, California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University. She holds degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA) and UC Berkeley (MFA).

Born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, Dubai, Malaysia and the Bay Area, Wofford has also lived in Oakland and Prague in addition to San Francisco. A committed and active member of the Bay Area art community, Wofford was Vice President of the Board of Directors of Southern Exposure.