“Stories told of this city today suggest that its inhabitants measure time with harm, damage is currency, and that more so than rain, coping is the definitive weather feature. festival:festival bookends these tales with visions for a communal salve, highlighting artists work who come to us in good faith. I could not be more thrilled to help usher in ff’s 2nd year, a chance for cohesion, an opportunity to nurture an ever more vibrant arts community, and by extension, our communities.”

mario lemafa (1990) is an artist, poet and organizer currently working in Seattle and living in South King County, Coast Salish lands. Their work engages with indigenous-diaspora dialectics, collectivist-individual relations, poetics, archiving, and recognition. A 2016 Stranger Genius Award nominee, lemafa has shown in group and solo exhibitions with the occasional curatorial effort.

Photo credit: mario lemafa.

“As a curator for festival:festival, I am currently interested in creating healing spaces, that celebrates unapologetic Blackness and expands the consciousness of those who interact with it. I am interested in changing the dynamic with which we interact with art and music to be less of an extraction and more of an energetic exchange.”

Amina Maya is a designer and photographer whose work centers around documenting and celebrating the beauty of the African diaspora. With roots in both Sierra Leone and the United States, Amina draws upon the imagery, color, and patterns that define West African art as well as the rich, evolving art culture of Black America. Currently, her practice is focused on artistically healing from multi-generational trauma, connecting with spirituality and unearthing ancestral wisdom. Amina graduated from Cornish College of the Arts with a BFA in Visual Communications in 2018. Her work has been featured in PDN Edu and Lithium Magazine.

Photo credit: Yousuf Dirie.

Sara Porkalob is an arts-activist, playwright, performer, and director based in Seattle. She’s been featured on City Art’s Future List, served as Intiman Theatre’s 2017 Co-Curator, and was one of the first recipients of a Village Theatre Original Writers Residency. She is a co-founder of DeConstruct, an online journal of intersectional performance critique. Dragon Lady, her first full-length work, has garnered a Seattle Times Footlight Award and Broadway World Award for “Best New Play” and in 2019, she will develop and perform her Dragon Cycle at American Repertory Theatre. This summer, she will produce a concert version of new musical The Lamplighter with collaborators Justin Huertas and Kirsten deLohr Helland.

Photo credit: Joshua Taylor.

Born in Bogotá, Colombia (1991), Juan learned creativity by example through the endless talents of their mother. As an artist and curator, they use art and its institutions to recover visual and literary methodologies to deconstruct systematic structures that damage their identities. They hold a BFA in Art (Summa Cum Laude) from Cornish College of the Arts. They currently live and practice in Seattle while pursuing a MA in Art History with a focus on Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practices at the University of Washington.

Carl Lawrence (b. 1992) is a Seattle-based artist and director whose work oscillates between performance, installation, and visual art. His work has been seen most notably with Seattle-based experimental theatre company Modern Recollections with whom he has presented work locally and nationally at venues such as The Watermill Center, On The Boards, Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA), Olson Kundig, Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival XIV, and Next Fest NW 2014. He will be presenting work at the ITINERANT Performance Festival curated by Hector Canonage at the Knockdown Center in New York in May 2018. He is also currently developing a new play entitled “aaaa” that will premiere at Base: Experimental Arts + Space in November 2018.