Program Associate/ Volunteer Coordinator, Tieton Arts and Humanities

Customer Service Associate, ANIMARTERENO Collective Program Coordinator

Discipline: Photography

Rudy Rivera is a Chamoru cultural practitioner raised in Santa Rita, Guam, who also specializes in graphic design, video, and photography. From his involvement within the different guma, he increased his traditional knowledge which led him to utilize his graphical skills to further promote his indigenous heritage.

His preferred art medium is photography His photos capture stories of the CHamoru people, its cultural practices and traditions, as well as the beautiful scenery and its lanmarks around the Marianas Islands. Through his photos, he aims to encourage and safeguard the CHamoru culture, its image, and traditions practices.

Discipline: Visual Arts

Ruta’ Tauiliili-Mahuka is a painter and crafter from Tafuna, American Samoa. Trained in painting by her grandfather, she focuses on island seascapes as well as close ups of island flora and fauna. She is also a crafter and creates wire jewelry that incorporates coconut, lava and shell beads as well as sea glass harvested from local beaches. Her work aims at raising awareness about environmental issues by using nature as both subject and materials. Her goal is to engage the viewer and to try and strengthen their relationship with island environments from the tropical forests to marine ecosystems.

Discipline: Photography

Samantha Teleso is a wife and a mother who photographs creative portraits in her free time. Raised as a U.S. Army brat, she moved to her ancestral home of American Samoa at 29 and ran a family photography business for several years before pausing to focus on her growing family. Teleso fulfills her passion of directing and photographing creative portraits that highlights American Samoa’s empowering women, breathtaking landscapes, and natural elements. Her goal to host a creative portrait event in American Samoa deems to connect its photography community and local businesses all for the sake of creating art.

A CHamoru born and raised on Guam, Sandra Flores’ work is inspired by the CHamoru cultural resurgence she has witnessed and the resulting explosion of indigenous expression across all art forms. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology at Northwestern University. She spent many years owning her own businesses in art and in healthcare. When she moved to San Diego, California, in 2011, those business skills were valuable in helping her to establish and support organizations such as the Uno Hit cultural education program and the House of Chamorros from 2012 to 2020. Her reflections on this work were the subject of her weekly column in Guam’s Pacific Daily News from 2012-2016. She earned a master’s in Peace Studies at the University of San Diego in 2021. All of these experiences led her to the position of director of the Guam Arts Agency from 2021 to 2023. She continues her work independently, writing and working with the Guam arts community both on Guam and in the diasporic populations across the continental US. She sees art as a powerful tool for self-expression, outreach, and community building, giving voice and driving change for greater understanding and greater equity.

Discipline: Multidisciplinary

Sapioamoa Taiulagi Galea’i, known as Sapi, was born and raised in American Samoa with deep roots in the villages of Fitiuta, Sapapali’i, Pava’ia’i, and Nu’uuli. She is of Samoan, Hawaiian, and Japanese descent. Sapi is married and, together with her husband, lovingly raises their four daughters and son.

Galea’i holds dual degrees in nutrition science and psychology, as well as a master’s degree in education. For more than a decade, she served as program director for the American Samoa Department of Education’s School Lunch Program, crafting daily meals for more than 12,000 children across 35 schools. In 2024, she transitioned from institutional kitchens to her own, discovering that cooking was more than a task—it was a language of love, a canvas for creativity, and a powerful form of therapy. From her home kitchen, she founded and now owns Four Sisters Catering Company, Lumana’i Property Management, and is developing a foodservice training space set to open in 2026.

Galea’i found that letting go of the success she once pursued made space for a passion that truly fed her soul. She treasures time with family and friends. When not in the kitchen, she enjoys meals with her father and husband, drives her children to school, sports, and dance, and ensures she carves out “me time.” Galea’i joy comes from creating something beautiful and nourishing, sharing it with others, and making lasting memories.

Discipline: Literature

Sarah Capdeville is a queer, disabled, place-based writer and the author of Aligning the Glacier’s Ghost, which won the 2022 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. She was a finalist for the 2019 Montana Prize in Nonfiction, and her work has appeared in Orion, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, Flyway, and other publications.

Capdeville holds an MFA in creative writing from Chatham University and studied resource conservation and wilderness studies at the University of Montana. For five seasons, she proudly served as a wilderness ranger in Montana’s Rattlesnake, Welcome Creek, and Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness areas.

An editor with The Hopper and The Changing Times, Capdeville lives in Missoula, Montana, with her partner, a lanky greyhound, and an opinionated tortoiseshell cat.

Sarah Ortegon HighWalking is an Indigenous artist and jingle dress dancer whose work centers her heritage and relationship to the land. Born in Denver into a family of 12 children, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Metropolitan State University of Denver in 2013 and also studied art history in Italy in 2012. That same year, she was named Miss Native American USA, using her platform to promote healthy living.

Ortegon HighWalking has performed widely with the Native Pride Dance Troupe in the United States and internationally. In 2020, she collaborated with Choctaw artist Jeffrey Gibson on She Never Dances Alone for Times Square’s Midnight Moment, and she later performed with Gibson and 26 other dancers at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Her work has also been featured at the MALCS conference at the University of Wyoming, where she held a solo exhibition, and she was selected for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Women to Watch exhibition.

She is featured in PBS’s The Art of Home: A Wind River Story, which was nominated for an Emmy in 2020, and appeared in Paramount’s 1923. Ortegon HighWalking is assistant director of human resources at the Native American Rights Fund and continues to balance her artistic practice, performance work and family life.

Discipline: Crafts

Sarojni Singh is an artist from Leone, American Samoa. She has a wide range of artistic expressions ranging from painting to jewelry making to flower preservation. She started a small business called “Roji Ella Handmade” where she creates earrings out of mostly polymer clay and adds a Polynesian twist. She has also collected local flowers in American Samoa, preserves them and turns them into jewelry and adds them to her paintings as well. Singh acknowledges that the Samoan Art class she took in college taught by her teacher Regina Meredith gave her valuable knowledge of Traditional Samoan art forms that still inspires her work today.

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.

Sho Rilla (Ronald Kalama) is a conscious Native hip-hop artist and filmmaker from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in Oregon. His work addresses addiction, suicide, generational trauma and systemic neglect while emphasizing growth, accountability and cultural resilience.

After losing his father to alcohol-related violence at a young age and facing instability throughout his upbringing, Sho Rilla turned to music as a source of discipline and direction. He began writing and performing at 16, using his art to process personal experience and speak to broader community realities with honesty and purpose.

Since then, he has built his career independently, opening for DJ Yella of N.W.A and Masta Killa of Wu-Tang Clan, and touring throughout the Pacific Northwest.

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