Laura Brown-Lavoie

Laura Brown-Lavoie is a poet, seminarian, and earth-worker. Author of Club Desire (Binch Press, 2022), Laura was the co-director of the Providence Poetry Slam from 2012-2015, and three times represented Providence as a finalist at national slam competitions. A long-time vegetable and flower farmer, Laura has in recent years turned to working with medicine plants and tending sanctuary gardens, with her teacher Deb Soule of Avena Botanicals. Laura serves as a birth doula for people as they welcome new babies, and as an ancestral medicine practitioner, supporting people to heal within their family lineages (more at elasticportal.space.) In 2023, Laura began a Masters of Divinity program at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She will serve for the coming year supporting the ministries of All Souls NYC Unitarian Universalist Church.

Justice Ameer

Justice Ameer is a poet, facilitator, and political educator in Providence, RI. Xe is a co-founding member of blackearth collective + lab. Xe is a two-time Providence Grand Slam champion and a member of the inaugural co-champion team of the Feminine Empowerment Movement Slam. Xe is a Pink Door Fellow and Faculty member, and xe was an Artist-in-Residence at Williams College in Spring 2020. Ameer co-created the theatrical production ANTHEM with Chrysanthemum at American Repertory Theater’s OBERON. Xyr work can be found in Split This Rock, the Academy of American Poets, POETRY magazine, The Nation, and various anthologies and journals.

April Brown

April Brown is an entrepreneur, artist, Director of the Racial & Environmental Justice Committee and co-director of the annual Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading Committee in Providence. Brown’s experience includes being an ordained minister and former teacher, education administrator, artist programmer and college counselor. More specifically here in Rhode Island, she has worked with Rhode Island Black Storytellers and the National Association of Black Storytellers as the African Marketplace director; and with Turnaround Arts: Providence as its local program director. She is a published poet, acclaimed singer and actress who has performed in the United States, Japan and Israel. Brown holds a Bachelors of Arts (BA) degree from the American University, in Washington, DC, and a Master’s in Education from the University of Rhode Island. It's no wonder that when asked, she served in several community-at-large leadership positions for arts and civics organizations. She has also served as a board member of Community Music Works and is a member of the Special Committee for Commemorative Works for Providence and other boards throughout the State.

Franny Choi

Franny Choi is a poet & essayist whose books include The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Franny is the current Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA and the founder of Brew & Forge. They teach at Bennington College.

Cai Diluvio

i am mother, artist, educator, organizer, facilitator, ritualist, storyteller, and land and food tender, hailing from the shores of the visayas in central philippines. the essence of my work is eco-social repair and world building, rooted in my animist lineage and care for the generations that came before and the ones to come after. i am the program director for movement education outdoors, co-organizer for new moon mycology summit, board member of taíno woods sanctuary, board member of emergent forest. currently, my favorite workshop to teach is intro to interspecies communication taught through a trance + arts workshop.

Haus of Glitter

The Haus of Glitter (based in Providence, RI) works, through movement, choreography, and song to shift the energetic center of the universe towards Queer Feminist BIPOC Liberation. In the work we share and co-create with audiences, we strive to embody ancestral liberation, healing and love in every step and every breath of our creative process and pedagogy. Our choreography aims to reach beyond the stage and into the streets; into our homes; into our institutions; into our hearts.

thehausofglitter.org @hausofglitterdanceco

Brooke Erin Goldstein

Brooke Erin Goldstein is a textile artist, curator, and teaching artist based in North Providence, RI. She is a RISD alumnus with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Textiles. Goldstein has shown nationally since 2003. From 2022 to 2023, her installation Reverberations saw 23,014 visitors at the Missouri Botanical Garden Sachs Museum and was featured in a St. Louis NPR piece. In 2024, Goldstein’s artist book Whatever: Thoughts on Feeling and Feelings on Thoughts was on display at the Jamestown Arts Center.

Goldstein co-founded the award-winning pop-up exhibition business Kiosk PVD. Goldstein’s curatorial project Con/textile/ize was featured on the cover of the Newport Mercury in 2018. Their curatorial project Resurfacing at the Jamestown Arts Center in 2022 broke new ground for the organization by including a sensory room experience for visitors.

As a teaching artist, Goldstein was the Gordon School’s Britt Nelson Visiting Artist and the Happy White Visiting Artist at the St. Andrew’s School in 2018. In 2023, she was selected for the RISCA’s Teaching Artist Roster and regularly offers free Anti-Capitalist Personal Finance for Artists workshops.

Her show Behind Open Doors at the New Bedford Art Museum in 2017 enlightened her perspective to the power of showing in educational spaces versus commercial galleries. In 2023 her public art piece Space & Time was on display at the Providence train station. This opened her eyes to the power of exhibiting outside of institutions. Goldstein loves the accessibility that public art provides and is inspired to make it a focus of her practice moving forward.

Andraly Horn

Born and raised in Nagodoches, Texas, Andraly has worn many hats in this life: son, brother, father, husband, friend, healer. Theater Arts in New York City, long-distance trucking, Massage Therapy School in Florida, frequent bather in an open air cast iron hot tub in the piney woods of East Texas, and at last moving to Rhode Island seventeen years ago. Andraly loves to spend as much time as possible observing and being still in the natural world. His love of nature is what informs him in his guided meditations and farming practices.

He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Health Science and he is an organic farmer. This connection to the land led him to become a Mindful Outdoor Guide through the Kripalu Center. He currently leads Nature Liberations and hosts retreats at Open fArms Retreat, a 2-acre farm in Cumberland, RI educating youth on sustainable farming practices while connecting with nature.

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson is a visual artist, scholar, composer, and curator. Her practice centers on the interplay of animation, printmaking, music, and dance, informed by a yearning to understand how our current circumstance is tethered to the trauma of the past. She received her BFA in Film, Animation, and Video at RISD, her MA in Public Humanities at Brown University, and a heavy dose of education working with youth in Baltimore, South Africa, India, New York City and Providence. Her work has been shown around the world and is held in many collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, RISD Museum, Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College, and UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

As the 2019 inaugural Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Department of Health she utilized the arts to confront health disparities. As 2022 Fitt Artist-in-Residence at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, where she created Not Never More a visual remix of the historic wallpaper Les Vues D’amérique Du Nord. For the 150th Anniversary of the Colfax Massacre she designed the Colfax Massacre Memorial—etched in granite, centering the stories of the Black victims of the tragedy. She is the illustrator of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, adapted for young readers by Ibram X Kendi released in 2024.

Vatic Astahili Tayari Kuumba [V.A.T.K]

Vatic Astahili Tayari Kuumba [V.A.T.K] (he/him) is an artist, writer, educator, and father of three children. Vatic is an Arts Facilitator for One Square World, a racial and climate justice organization, where he applies creativity as an essential tool for policy design, civic engagement, and popular education. Vatic is the Artist in residence for Chad Brown and the Lead artist for Casa Futura (2024) part of One Nation One Project’s Arts for Everybody Initiative. Vatic is co-director and lead writer for MoralDocs (2021), an abolitionist transmedia project and virtual reality film. He was a collaborator on the creation of the City of Providence’s Climate Justice Plan and the Environmental Racism Resolution passed by Providence City Council in 2020, as part of the Racial and Environmental Justice Committee (REJC) in Providence. Vatic was Artist-in-Residence for the State Association of Arts Agencies in 2019. His first theatrical production, A Furtive Movement (2017) premiered at AS220 in Providence, RI, as a culmination of his AS220 Live Arts Residency. Vatic is also the recipient of the RI State Council for the Arts (RISCA) 2018 Fellowship for Theater and 2017 Playwright Merit Fellowship.

Viennia Lopes Booth

Viennia Lopes Booth explores the intersections of life, death, and the plant world as an educator, advocate and earth tender. Guided by her indigenous cultural traditions and her dad’s deep respect for nature, Viennia successfully navigated the end-of-life continuum to honor her father’s wishes to die at home, have a home wake and be cared for by family until the very end. Her experience caring for her dad at the end of his life took her on a deep exploration of natural deathcare, and she shares her personal story to help spread awareness about options beyond conventional deathcare. She aims to empower families and communities to care for their loved ones at the time of death. Viennia encourages consideration about choices around deathcare and its impact on the environment, our communities and each other. She is currently working toward creating a conservation burial ground in her home county and forming a non-profit focused on community-empowered and ecologically conscious deathcare advocacy. *(www.returningtoourroots.org) Viennia is an enrolled member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. She is the daughter of a Mashpee Wampanoag /Cape Verdean father and a Dutch/English mother whose ancestors include both the original indigenous inhabitants of Cape Cod and some of its earliest colonists from afar.

Lilly Manycolors

Lilly Manycolors (Australian-American b. 1989), is a mother, mixed media visual & performing artist, scholar and youth arts educator known for their emotionally-excavating artworks and ritual performances. Their work centers the issues of humanness, anthropocentrism and motherhood, seeking to practice imagining liberated worlds and paths to get there. Manycolors' is the founder and director of AUNTY'S HOUSE, a community arts studio in Providence, RI which centers parent artists, youth and arts education.

Ceci Pineda

ceci pineda (they/them) is a brown queer musician, ecosystem caretaker and facilitator. A singer, guitarist, and jaranere, ceci creates for Tlalli (earth, land, and soil), our more-than-human relationships, community liberation and dreaming of new relationships-based climate justice worlds.

Jordan Seaberry

Jordan Seaberry is a painter, organizer, legislative advocate and educator. Born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, he came to Providence to attend Rhode Island School of Design, and later, Roger Williams University School of Law. Alongside his art, he built a career as a grassroots organizer and as Director of Public Policy at the Nonviolence Institute, helping to pass multiple criminal justice reform milestones, including probation reform, the Unshackling Pregnant Prisoners Bill, and the statewide Community-Police Relationship Act. 

Seaberry serves as Co-Director of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, and as a professor at Rhode Island School of Design. He serves as Chairman of the Providence Board of Canvassers, overseeing the city’s elections, and as a Board Member at New Urban Arts. He has served as artist in residence at Skowhegan, Yaddo, the Verge Center of the Arts, and elsewhere. His work is in collections including the RISD Museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum, the deCordova Museum, and others. 

Seaberry maintains a studio in Providence.

Early Shinada

Early Shinada is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work convenes collective moments of witness around live relays of history.

Sydesho

Oliver 'Syde-Sho' Arias is a Dominican-American filmmaker from Providence, RI. He aims to use the power of film to highlight the lives of artists, activists, community members/organizers, and social/political movements.

He prides himself in being able to film amazing storytellers that bring life to the screen as he helps facilitate that process by creating a vulnerable and safe space that allows for the best stories.