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.

Taiko Arts Center

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.