Santa Fe Friends of Traditional Music

Santa Fe Pro Musica

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.

Sarada Kala Nilayam

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.

Screamfest Horror Film Festival

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.