Discipline: Crafts

Shannon Quan Iriarte was born and raised on the island of Guahan. In May 2016, she graduated with a bachelor’s of Arts in Theatre with a focus on Theatre for Young Audiences at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She had designed shadow puppets for “Secrets of Green-Wood” at the 2018 New York Theater Festival Winterfest and “The Cadaver Synod: A Pope Musical” at the 2017 New York Musical Festival.

She performed as a puppeteer for the 2018 Jim Henson Foundation Puppetry Residency’s performance “Ruby and Charlie” at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. From 2017-2019, she performed with The Shadow Box Theatre, a children’s puppetry theater company in Brooklyn, NY. Most recently, she co-devised and created a tall puppet for Breaking Wave Theatre Company’s award winning devised piece, “We Will Not Go Silent”. She continues to use her passion for puppetry to help reinforce Guahan’s indigenous Chamorro culture and language.

SheenRu Yong is a dance artist, choreographer, and the initiator of body_portal_theatre. She began dancing at Wesleyan University and then trained in New York City, Taipei, and Berlin where she was commissioned and inspired to choreograph evening-length shows, site-specific works, and community-based performances. While earning her MFA in Choreography at the Taipei National University of the Arts, she toured internationally with Legend Lin Dance Theatre. Through the platform body_portal_theatre, she works to research and develop the creative potentials of the individual, collective, and environmental bodies we inhabit.

SheenRu specializes in making interactive work with audiences and communities to create immersive experiences. Under the auspices of the LuoManFei Dance Fund and the Taiwan Ministry of Culture, she spearheaded FLOOD / turn the tide, a community collaborative effort to create conversations about water featuring local stories, experiences, and sites through events and performances in Hawaiʻi, Myanmar and Taiwan. Her series, THIN SKIN, which explored vulnerability and empathic resonance, was presented as site-specific performance installations, workshops, and exhibits in Hawaiʻi, Germany, Iceland, and Spain.

A Taiwanese American born and raised in the midwest of the U.S., SheenRu is happy to now call Hawaiʻi home.

Discipline: Literature

Sheila Black is a disabled poet, essayist, and editor whose work focuses on language, embodiment, and the power of art to build community. She is the author of five poetry collections and three chapbooks, including Radium Dream (Salmon Poetry, 2022), with a new collection, Cinnamon Fire, forthcoming in spring 2026. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, Blackbird, Kenyon Review Online, and The New York Times.

Black holds a bachelor’s degree in French literature from Barnard College (1983) and a master’s degree and MFA in English and creative writing (poetry) from the University of Montana (1998). Her education informs her attention to voice, translation as both practice and metaphor, and literary lineage as a means of reclaiming disability history and culture.

She is a co-editor of the landmark anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos, 2011) and The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos, 2017), an anthology of fiction by disabled writers that received the Barbara Jordan Media Award. Black is also a co-founder of Zoeglossia, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating disability poetry communities.

Her cultural work focuses on creating space and community for writers who are often overlooked, including disabled writers, older women writers, and arts administrators seeking support and creative sustenance in an increasingly challenging cultural environment.

She lives in Tempe, Arizona, and serves as assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Student, UC Berkeley

Shiori Green is a student fellow for Just Cities and the Deeply Rooted Collaborative, currently pursuing a Master’s in City Planning at UC Berkeley. Shiori’s background in architecture combined with her passion for social justice is at the heart of all of her work. Currently Shiori is exploring the intersection of design and public policy through her investigation of cultural community development in Oakland. Using her skills in legal and policy analysis, combined with a desire to find ground truths, Shiori advocates for local governments to take an active role in ending systemic inequity and eliminating disparate harm in communities of color. Shiori’s experience in local government, New York City’s Department of City Planning as well as the City of Berkeley’s Office of Economic Development, informs her belief that local governments have the capacity to bring meaningful change in neighborhoods. Oscillating between work at the local government and work with community advocacy groups, Shiori aims to understand the various systems of power that can be used to bring about change in neighborhoods. Shiori enjoys bringing facets of art and design into all of her work, and believes in the strength of art based advocacy as catalyst for community organizing. Born and raised in Hawaii, Shiori values the strength of tight knit communities, and the joy that comes from sharing individual cultural values with others. Through this fellowship Shiori hopes to further investigate the lack of cultural infrastructure funding seen in Oakland today, and explore meaningful policy changes that are grounded in anti-displacement and community voice.

Shireen Alihaji is a First Gen, Ecuadorian-Iranian, Muslim and Disabled artist. Her intersections inspire her to create space through the intersection of art and technology. Given how we remember is pivotal to healing, her work uses memory as a central gaze to uncensor the imagination and mirror our infinite reflections. With over a decade supporting labor unions with media justice work, she has developed a social arts practice across all her projects.

Sophia Felder was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska and has been a permanent resident of Denver, Colorado since 2010. Sophia is currently working to preserve statewide historical sites and structures as a Historical Preservations Grant Contract Specialist with the State Historic Fund based out of History Colorado. Sophia’s love of global cultures, history, and identity led her to complete an undergraduates in Anthropology with a minors in Spanish from the Metropolitan State University of Denver and will be continuing her education by enrolling in Adams State Universities Masters program in Cultural Resource Management. Her own cultural heritage has taken her to Colombia, the West Indies, and New Orleans to find the interconnectedness of these groups within the Americas and the greater global communities.

Conservator, Utah Museum of Fine Arts

Discipline: Multidisciplinary

Stella Nall “Bisháakinnesh” (Rode Buffalo) is a multimedia artist and poet from Bozeman, Montana. A first descendant of the Crow tribe, her work is informed by her experiences navigating the world and often centers current issues pertaining to Indigenous identity, visibility and representation.

She graduated from the University of Montana in 2020 with a BFA in Printmaking, a BA in Psychology and a minor in Art History and Criticism. She now lives in Missoula, where she is represented by Radius Gallery.

Her work may be seen as murals across the western states, and has been acquired to permanent collections at Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), The Institute of American Indian Arts Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM), The Montana Museum of Art and Culture (Missoula, MT), and Montana State University (Bozeman, MT).

Estefania Ramirez began her career as a dancer at 17, making her debut at the Royal Albert Hall in London. She toured nationally with Maria Benitez Teatro Flamenco before relocating to Spain in 1997, where she studied extensively with many grand maestros.

Ramirez served as a dance professor and movement theory specialist for the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Education, developing K-9 dance education programs for music and physical education in public schools across the Communitat Valenciana.

In May 2018, she debuted “Mujeres Valientes” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, a dance drama choreographed by flamenco icon Belen Maya. Ramirez was also featured as a leading flamenco dance soloist at the Women in Dance International Dance Conference at Drexel University in Philadelphia and recognized at the Association of Performing Arts Professionals Cohort Leadership Conference in New York City in January 2023.

She is currently the co-director of Entreflamenco in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Stephen Aifegha was born in Lagos State, located in the western region of Nigeria. His artistic practice is deeply influenced by his identity and culture as an African, shaped by his experiences of being born and raised in Nigeria. Although rooted in his Nigerian heritage, Aifegha identifies more broadly as African.

He is a contemporary African artist currently living and working in the United States. Aifegha holds a bachelor’s degree in art with a minor in visual communication from Idaho State University.

As a mixed-media artist, he incorporates newsprint and African fabrics as primary elements in his collages. The newspaper serves as a vehicle for social commentary, while African fabrics prominently featured in his work reflect his cultural identity and that of the broader African community.

Aifegha’s work focuses on post-colonial themes, addressing historical, political, and socio-cultural narratives. Through his art, he explores and depicts the enduring legacies of colonialism and the influence of Western culture on the African continent.

Discipline: Visual Arts

Steven Young Lee is an artist in Helena, Montana. He was the Director of the Archie Bray Foundation for 16 years until 2022. In 2004-05, he lectured and taught at universities throughout China as part of an educational exchange and spent time in Seoul, South Korea studying ceramic tradition and history. In 2005-6 he was a visiting professor at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, B.C.

Lee has lectured extensively in North America and Asia. In the Fall of 2016 he was one of four artists featured as part of the Renwick Invitational at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2019, he had a solo exhibition at the Portland Art Museum and in 2021, his work was included in “Crafting America”, at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

His work has been collected by the Smithsonian Museum, LACMA, the Portland Art Museum, the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, Korea, and many private and public collections.

Lee earned his BFA and MFA from Alfred University

Discipline: Folklife/Traditional Arts

Susan Castro-Cabrera was born and raised on the island of Rota, now residing in Saipan, CNMI. Growing up in a close-knit island community, she learned sustainable living, service, and the value of cultural heritage. She credits her parents for instilling in her the values of family, faith, tradition, hard work, and education.

A cultural practitioner, Castro-Cabrera aspires to promote the Chamorro Healing Arts through storytelling, outreach, and sharing of medicinal samples. She is inspired by her mother, a cultural healer, who taught Susan the traditions and benefits of the Chamorro medicine and coconut oil. Her project honors her mother’s memory, her elders, and ancestors, ensuring this knowledge is preserved, practiced, and passed on to future generations.

Suzanne Pickett is president of the Historic Eastside Community Development Corporation in Jacksonville, Florida, where she champions preservation, revitalization and community development through arts and culture. A multidisciplinary artist and nationally recognized strategist, she unites creativity and community empowerment to strengthen under-resourced communities.

Pickett holds a bachelor’s in fine arts from the University of North Florida and is certified in community real estate development from the University of South Florida. She has served on the National Endowment for the Arts grant panel and as a 2025 board member for the Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville.

Her recognitions include the 2025-26 Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship, 2025 Women’s Center of Jacksonville SHERO Award, 2023 NFL Aspire Change Award, a 2022 Jacksonville Business Journal Woman of Influence honor, silver and gold ADDY awards with the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Eastside Legacy Community Champion Award.

Through her leadership, Pickett helps preserve history, elevate community voices and create sustainable opportunities for future generations by integrating arts, housing and economic development for social change.

Discipline: Folklife/Traditional Arts

As much of their work focuses on reclaiming their identity as a natural being, Syon is largely inspired by biomimicry – they experience plants, animals (including humans), arthropods, & fungi as mirrors and opportunities for reflection. Syon’s oeuvre is made up of artifacts from their decolonization process – an intentional practice of shifting away from anti-black, patriarchal, cis-heteronormative, & human-supremacist ways of being and moving towards behaviors and patterns rooted in pleasure, balance, acceptance, interdependence & reciprocity. Syon is a neurodivergent artist for which sticking with any one medium sounds tedious and impossible. In their current iteration, they are exploring the aforementioned ideas through film, movement, collage, textiles, & the written word and at the intersections of those things. Syon was raised in Pomona, CA and currently resides in Portland, OR.

Discipline: Design Arts

Tamara Burton is a costuming and mixed media artist with 3+ decades of experience. She has been Lead Costume Designer for Guam’s World Theater Productions since 2018. She designed and produced costumes for Lion King Jr, Beauty and the Beast, Moana Jr, Frozen Jr, Jesus Christ Superstar, Dare to Dream, Mamma Mia, and more. She is honored to be a part of WTP, bringing high quality musical theater to the island and encouraging the development of local performers (many of them children). She is a family historian and writer, when she’s not designing and sewing.

Discipline: Literature

Tamiano Gurr is a poet, community advocate, and cultural storyteller from American Samoa. He is the co-founder of Pacific Roots Open Mic (P.R.O.M.), a youth-led nonprofit that fosters creative expression, cultural pride, and mental wellness through spoken word, music, and storytelling. Raised in the village of Maloata, Gurr draws inspiration from Samoan traditions, the land, and ocean. Guided by community elders and local artists, his work bridges generations and uplifts Pacific voices. Through performances, workshops, and advocacy, he creates safe spaces where young people can share their truths, celebrate identity, and build connections rooted in culture.

Tamiano Gurr serves as territorial chief grants officer for the American Samoa Government, overseeing the Grants Clearinghouse Division. He manages federal and territorial funding across departments, strengthening local capacity and accountability in grants administration.

Gurr has secured and managed multimillion-dollar federal awards for projects spanning public health, agriculture, infrastructure and community development. He also co-founded Pacific Roots Open Mic (P.R.O.M.), a nonprofit promoting youth empowerment and mental wellness through creative arts and cultural storytelling.

Under his leadership, P.R.O.M. has launched federally funded programs focused on cultural expression, community healing and leadership development. Gurr holds a bachelor’s in business marketing and a master’s in management and leadership.

Born and raised in American Samoa, he is dedicated to building sustainable systems, elevating local talent and expanding access to resources that support the territory’s self-sufficiency and growth.

Based in metro Atlanta, Tanesha Ferguson is the development operations and institutional giving manager at the Alliance Theatre, an organization dedicated to expanding hearts and minds on and off stage. She also serves as a creative and administrative consultant for the Black Donors Project, a participatory research initiative examining how underfunding, cultural taxation and extractive labor expectations impact BIPOC-led arts organizations.

A Vassar College graduate with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, Ferguson explored how young Black women construct love narratives through self-definition and self-preservation. A lifelong arts enthusiast, she studied dance throughout college and began her career as an artistic and community programming intern at Dance Place in Washington, D.C., in 2017. She later joined the 2022 League of Regional Theatres EDI Mentorship Program and has worked with organizations including YoungArts and the Art of Hip Hop Fund.

As an arts administrator, Ferguson focuses on using the arts as a tool for social justice and community connection. She also prioritizes data integrity and creating equitable access to philanthropy. Outside of work, she enjoys writing, experimenting in the kitchen and catching up on her favorite films and TV shows.

Discipline: Crafts

Tanya Salas is a proud Micronesian and Polynesian, hailing from Nukuoro Atoll, a Polynesian enclave in the outer islands of Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia. Raised in a family that cherishes and upholds their cultural heritage through traditional weaving and carving, she has made the Northern Mariana Islands her home for over two decades.

Salas’ deep passion for her Polynesian and Micronesian roots drives her active engagement in her community, where she practices cultural traditions such as dancing, weaving, and beading to create intricate jewelry. As the owner of a small business, Tahine’s Creations, she produces and sells handmade handicrafts, including fresh and artificial flower crowns, leis, and floral accessories. Committed to preserving and promoting these cultural arts, Salas teaches at local schools, guiding students in crafting and wearing these traditional pieces, thereby fostering cultural pride. She has also shared short videos showcasing the projects that keep her engaged daily.

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Tara Keanuenue Gumapac is a Kanaka Maoli artist residing in Heʻeia, Oʻahu. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in 2008 and a Master of Education in Teaching through the Hoʻokulaiwi Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2010.

Gumapac is an alumna of the HOEA Program and the 2017 Intercultural Leadership Institute. She participated in “Tears of DukwibahL: Gathering of International Indigenous Visual Artists of the Pacific Rim” in 2017, was a 2018 WESTAF Emerging Leaders of Color alumna, and a 2022 First Peoples Fund Fellow for the Artist in Business Leadership.

A dedicated participant in the Maoli Arts Movement with PAʻI Foundation, she also served as a member at large on Creative West’s Equity and Inclusion Committee. She is a mother, artist, Hawaiian cultural advocate, and practitioner, as well as an art teacher at Kalāheo High School.

Her recent projects include completing a traditional hale structure at Kalāheo and creating the first Hawaiian-language Braille children’s book.

Unguwat Program Coordinator, Alaska Native Heritage Center

Theda Sandiford is an award winning self-taught fiber and installation artist hailing from St Croix USVI.

Drawing inspiration from the profound impact of racial trauma, Theda melds various fibers with an array of found materials through the art of free form weaving, coiling, knotting, and jewelry-making techniques. Her meticulously gathered materials, combined with community contributions, serve as a testament to collective memory, transforming into “social fabric.” This intertwines contemporary issues and personal narratives, fostering a rich tapestry of interconnected stories.

At the core of Theda’s creative process lies community art-making. She orchestrates multi-disciplinary experiences that unite individuals, sound, and artistry to cultivate a sanctuary for exploring themes of equity and inclusion, sustainability, and personal well-being.

Theda’s artistic footprint extends globally, in venues such as World of Threads, Expo Chicago, Untitled Art Fair, SPRING/BREAK ART SHOW, Governor’s Island NYC, New Jersey Arts Annual, and American Contemporary Craft: National Juried Exhibition. Her work has received acclaim in Excellence in Fibers VI and Fiber VIII from Fiber Art Now, earning her the 2020 Jersey City Arts Visual Artist Award, the 2021 Fellowship in Craft from the NJ State Council on the Arts, and the 2022 Jersey City Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship.