Michael Aguhar is an attorney and organizer.  He was born in Edgewater and raised in Houston, Texas.  Thirty years later, he moved back to Chicago to build community.  Currently, he is the Executive Director of the Alliance of Filipinos for Immigrant Rights and Empowerment (AFIRE), a grassroots organization that builds the capacity of the Filipino/a/x community to organize on issues of social, racial, and economic justice.  In 2016, he worked in coalition with low-income workers to pass the Illinois Domestic Worker Bill of Rights.  When he is not working on immigrant rights and worker rights, Michael can be found in the kitchen cooking or reading a cookbook.

Irina Zadov is an artist, educator, and cultural organizer. A Soviet Jewish refugee, her practice explores the liminal space between individual and collective, home and state, diasporic community and chosen family. At its core, her work is relational. She builds with youth, artists, grassroots organizers, and cultural institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, Smart Museum of Art, National Museum of Mexican Art, DuSable Museum of African American History, Cambodian American Heritage Museum, Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, Chicago Freedom School, Free Street Theater, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, and DCR Studios in The Hague. She is currently the Senior Program Specialist at the Chicago Park District where she co-creates city-wide youth programs exploring identity, community, and solidarity through the lens of cultural stewardship. She is a Co-Founder and Executive Producer of the Chicago Home Theater Festival, which she loves with all her heart.

eedahahm: autodidactic wabi-sabi zen koan + dorodango = qigong; diametrically dialectical finite infinity " daometrically daolectical " quantum wuji & taichi skepticism optimism (chanting with your grandparents) moxibust you, kratom channel you, danmoi you, intuitive medacognition abstraction.  bison poop sage & epigenatical trauma : silence as resistance as healing as soup - love = ohm = mhm = mom  dibrakutombuhmbummmmmmmmmm

Silvia Gonzalez is an Artist and Educator living in Chicago creating zines and curating workshops to address police violence, labor rights, imagination, play, freedom, and confinement. Collaborative justice based projects include work with local art groups such as the Chicago ACT (Artist Creating Transformation) collective and the 96 Acres Project, led by the Artist Maria Gaspar. Silvia Gonzalez has experience organizing educational workshops that centralize creative work with intergenerational participants interested in critically disrupting current power imbalances. As an multidisciplinary artist, she uses visual and performance work to make connections between justice work, education, histories of trauma, manners of healing, Xicanidad, the Nepantla state, and the radical imaginary. She is the organizer of an artist group called POCAS, People of Color Artist Space and connects artists of color from across Chicago to resources and each other. 

Himabindu (Bindu) Poroori is a storyteller, musician, and curator. As co-curator at Salonathon, she creates space for underground, emerging, and genre-defying art in Chicago. Bindu also works as a Community Engagement Coordinator with Illinois Humanities. Her own artistic work deals with modern South Asian immigrant identity, primarily through music and written/spoken word. Catch her performing across the city solo and with her collective, LEELA.

Crystle Dino, a Pinay Chicago native, is guided by her passions in the visual, performance, and healing arts rooted in community and her cultural upbringings.  She reflects her genuine response in the moment to questions of Home, identity, culture, history, and spirituality.  Her art has been a space for her to transform and empower her Self and her community.  Crystle discovers her voice and Pinay aesthetic as she works to connect her Filipinx indio-genius roots and Chicago upbringing.  She unearths herstory and investigates time, place, and relation to understand the concept of freedom and her place and responsibility in this world.  She does this by incorporating elements of the body, participation, and memory and creating movement using repetition in patterns immersed in personal stories, collective experiences, and folklore.  She is a co-founder of the Filipin@ transnational art collective Escolta Street Snatchers Social Club and has had the privilege of traveling to the Philippines with Kaluluwa Kolectivo to re-connect to and understand indigenous spiritual practices in a political and intersectional framework.  She is a Reiki practitioner and embodies her freedom by training in Filipino Martial Arts and dancing.  Crystle is currently a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute Chicago in the Master of Arts in Art Therapy and Counseling program.

Jennifer Ligaya is a performance composer born and raised in Chicago. A thinker, a healer, and a lifelong performer, Ligaya has an interdisciplinary background including visual art (Gallery 37), vocal performance (Hard Rock Cafe), spoken word (Lit X), dance (Field Museum with Tamboula Ethnic Dance Company), and theater (Pinting Theater Company). This is her second year having the honor of performing at the Chicago Home Theater Festival. Aside from her community work as an occupational therapist and teaching artist with Urban Gateways, she writes and performs original music, sound, and performative works, most recently at the Silver Room, Links Hall, and the Stony Island Arts Bank. Her most current explorations aim to weave mediums and utilize contemporary performance practices to examine the intersections of race, gender, decolonization, indigeneity, activism, and healing.  Ligaya has completed her MA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College. jenniferligaya.com

Patricia Nguyen is an artist, educator, and scholar born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. As a child of refugees, her performance work is grounded in her family’s stories to critically engage with issues of forced migration, notions of freedom, inherited war trauma, state violence, memory, and healing. Patricia is co-founder and executive director of Axis Lab, a community centered art, food, and design studio based in Uptown, Chicago that focuses on equitable development for the Southeast Asian community. In her practice as a performance artist, she works creating durational performances and devised theater pieces that bring together oral histories of Vietnamese/American refugees through poetry and labor intensive movements while working with a juxtaposition between natural and fabricated materials (such as water, soil, fish sauce, fabric, and plastics). Her work in installation art seeks to play with the tactile and sensorial affects of audience witnessing and participation. She has performed at the Nha San Collective in Vietnam, Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, Jane Addams Hull House, Oberlin College, Northwestern University, University of Massachusetts Boston, Links Hall, Prague Quadrennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile. She has facilitated trainings and workshops with The Fulbright Program, U.S. Embassy in Vietnam, Jane Addams Hull House, Social Workers Association in Vietnam, and Asian Human Services on issues ranging from mental health, youth empowerment, and language access. Patricia is also a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans.

Originally from Mexico City, Ivan Resendiz began his study of classical guitar at the age of sixteen at the Escuela Superior de Música (ESM) del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) in Mexico City under the instruction of teacher Alejandro Mendez. Ivan Resendiz has performed in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Italy, France, Austria, Germany, and in many cities throughout the United States in events such as competitions, university courses and concerts. Ivan has been a finalist in thirteen international competitions, receiving Top Prizes since 2008. Ivan was also chosen to represent Mexico as one of the ten international finalists in the World Guitar Competition in April of 2012 in Serbia. Since 2011, Ivan Resendiz has directed and organized the Latin American Guitar Festival in Chicago where he currently lives.