Raised in Alaska by Bulgarian immigrants, Ryan Alexiev received a BA in History from the UC Berkeley and an MFA from the California College of the Arts, where he currently teaches in Graduate Design program. He has exhibited at galleries across the country including he Andy Warhol Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Armory Show in New York, and the Oakland Museum of California. Ryan is also co-founder of the ©AUSE COLLECTIVE which was commissioned to create The Truth is I Am You for the University of California at San Francisco and the video installation Along the Way for the Oakland International Airport. Along the Way went on to feature at the Sundance Film Festival.

Jim Ricks is a conceptual artist who problematises preconceptions about identity and value with a clever epistemology. His work is research driven, publicly engaged, and site specific.

He has had solo shows at Casa Maauad (Mexico City), Pallas Projects (Dublin), the Hugh Lane Gallery (Dublin), Onomatopee (Eindhoven, NL), and shown in a number of group shows including at the Imperial War Museum (London, UK), Jack Shainman Gallery (NYC), Ulster Museum (Belfast), Temple Bar Gallery & Studios (Dublin), Royal Hibernian Academy (Dublin), Galway Arts Festival (Galway), Art Basel Miami Art Public (Miami), The Limerick City Gallery of Art (Limerick), and the Cranbrook Art Museum (Detroit).

Jorge Sanchez is an Ethnographer born in Colombia and based in California. He is a researcher at the Cesar Chavez Institute (CCI) and at the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality (CRGS) in San Francisco. At CCI, his work has focused on the Family Acceptance Project, a California Endowment funded project looking at familial acceptance and rejection of queer youth. At CRGS his work focuses on the Relations Study, a Ford Foundation funded project looking at how class, race, and ethnicity impact the lives of young adults. The data he collected at CRGS is being analyzed with data from Brazil and South Africa, and will be part of the Foundation’s upcoming publication on cross-cultural sexualities. His work has appeared in several publications including the Journal of Urban Health and the American Association of Anthropology. Since the mid-nineties, he has worked at the grassroots level as a health educator and community organizer for people at risk for contracting or transmitting HIV. He has served on the Board of Directors of several local non-profit agencies and city commissions as well as review panels for San Francisco’s Department of Public Health. He is interested in contributing to the field of visual anthropology.

Will Sylvester received a BA with a concentration on Documentary Film for Social and Cultural Change from the University of Massachusetts in 2011. That same year he went on to edit, build and tour the Question Bridge: Black Males exhibition, including showings at Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontiers and the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival. As a member of the Cause Collective, Will helped to create The Long March, a 65-feet wide, 14-feet tall, 27-monitor installation incorporating depictions of movement, migration and marching from different eras in Alabama history. It is a permanent installation at the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth Airport in Alabama. Will has also served as supervising editor for several projects including “Am I Going Too Fast,” “A person is worth more than anything else…” and “We are not yet free….”

Hank Willis Thomas is a photo conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history and popular culture. He received a BFA in Photography and Africana studies from New York University and his MFA/MA in Photography and Visual Criticism from the California College of Arts. His work is featured in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Oakland Museum of California. He has exhibited at the Smithsonian, National Museum of American History, and the High Museum of Art, among others.