Marlissa Karpeh, also known as Lissa Karpeh, is a Liberian American painter currently living and working in Minnesota. Her life-size paintings are informed by her first-generation immigrant identity and background in mental health work. Karpeh explores the self, other, and context in her figural, richly colored oil and acrylic paintings. Her recent work examines the concept of “double consciousness” (developed by W. E. B. Du Bois) as it relates to western oppressive perceptions of Black identity. She received her BFA from Saint Cloud State  and is currently an artist in the Studio 400 cohort. Descriptions of her expressive painting style have recently been featured in Vanity Fair magazine.

Helen Shewolfe Tseng (she/they/wolf) is an inter/multidisciplinary artist, designer, and witch drawn to odd-shaped projects and practices. Their work is concerned with ritual, hauntings, personal histories and ancestries, cosmology, and animals as proxies and portals to investigating human experience. She is the former co-host of Astral Projection Radio Hour (2014-2020), co-author and illustrator of The Astrological Grimoire (2019). Helen was born to Taiwanese immigrants under a full moon in the Deep South, and is currently quarantined in San Francisco, California.

Dara Beevas is a writer and publisher based in Minneapolis. She has published more than 500 books and worked with more than 400 authors in her career. As the co-founder and CEO of Wise Ink Creative Publishing, she leads a team of editors, designers, and artists committed to changing the world through offering platforms to marginalized voices and purpose-oriented authors. Dara was a 2009 Givens Foundation for African American Literature Emerging Writers Fellow and a 2017-2019 Bush Fellow. She’s authored three books about book publishing and is currently crafting a children’s picture books series profiling black queens through history. A native of the Washington, D.C. area, Dara currently lives in Minneapolis with her daughter Genesis, and her husband Tomme, who is the owner of local restaurant Pimento Jamaican Kitchen.