Hali Autumn is a multi-disciplinary artist working across film forms and movement, instrumentalizing allegory and poetic symbology, while exploring human truths and personal mythology. Her preferred medium is film-making, which she uses for the transmutation and translations of these themes. She is the curator and organizer for the South Sound Experimental Film Festival, which debuted at the Northwest Film Forum this past November (2021).

Rachel Kessler is a writer, cartoonist, multi-disciplinary collaborator and educator who explores landscape and community. As a mother of young children with limited resources she experimented with boundary-breaking performance art and video, co-founding interactive poetry collaborations Typing Explosion and Vis-à-Vis Society. Her work is deeply rooted in place: she lives and works on Yesler Way, the Seattle street her ancestors immigrated to, worked on, worshipped on and died on. She is working on a community cartography project called “Profanity Hill: A Tour of Yesler Way.” As Artist-In-Residence at public housing project Yesler Terrace, (where her great grandparents lived) she and community members activated a vacant apartment slated for demolition with live music, poetry and story-telling, potlucks, dancing, and collective murals. She co-founded the collective Wa Na Wari, a residential reclamation project centering Black art and media in Seattle’s Central District. Currently she is working on a children’s book about abortion and illustrating a poetry guidebook of the Pacific Northwest urban shore.

Photo credit: Kelly O

Anne de Marcken is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Her credits include multimedia installations, short and feature-length films, and hybrid fictions and realities of various lengths. She is author of the lyric novella, The Accident: An Account (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), and her writing has been featured in Best New American Voices, Ploughshares, Narrative, Entropy, Glimmer Train, Southern Indiana Review, on NPR’s Selected Shorts and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship (2017) and has been awarded the Howard Frank Mosher Prize for Short Fiction, the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Prize, the Mary C. Mohr Short Fiction Award and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award in addition to numerous jury and audience prizes for her experimental feature film Group (2002), notable for its groundbreaking use of video-to-film and streaming technologies, as well as its emergent narrative and queer/feminist subject matter. Recent site-specific works include Invisible Ink (2017) and Invisible Ink: Homeless (2018) two process-based engagements with the peril and privilege of invisibility, and The Redaction Project (2016), an interdisciplinary interrogation of narrative, words and loss. Her work across disciplines has garnered grant and fellowship support from the Millay Colony, Jentel Foundation, Centrum, Artist Trust and the Hafer Family Foundation. Anne lives with her wife, fellow artist Marilyn Freeman, in Olympia, Washington, where she runs The 3rd Thing, an independent press dedicated to publishing interdisciplinary, intersectional work.

A 2014 Stranger Genius Award nominee, Shin Yu Pai is the author of ten books of poetry. Her work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, The United Kingdom, and Canada. Poems have been commissioned by the Dallas Museum of Art twice and her work is also featured in the Poetry-in-Motion Program sponsored by DART. She has been a featured presenter at national and international literary festivals including the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival and the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival.

Hedgebrook is a global community of women writers and people who seek extraordinary books, poetry, plays, films and music by women. A literary nonprofit, our mission is to support visionary women writers whose stories and ideas shape our culture now and for generations to come. Hedgebrook’s Program Team is thrilled to partner with Cadence to act as juror for the Female-Identifying Artist Award!

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is a writer exploring the liminal spaces of the literary arts. She is the author of the chapbooks Adventures in Property Management (Sibling Rivalry, 2017) and Thunder Lizard (H_NGM_N, 2016). Her interest in how words are experienced has led to solo work and collaborations with artists across media to create gallery installations, classical music performances, broadsides, karaoke, and video poetry. She is co-founder and director of Till, a literary organization that offers an annual writing residency at Smoke Farm in Arlington, WA and a museum communications professional.

Râna San is an intermedia artist, curator, and night dreamer pondering language and lineage, intimacy and interdependence. In community, Râna crafts collective experiences that elevate the work of storytellers, artists, and activists using moving image media and contemporary performing arts to cultivate connection through creative expression. She has developed and produced cultural festivals, museum programs, and intimate creative salons in Seattle, Istanbul, and Barcelona and serves as the Artistic Director at Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, WA where she co-curates year-round programming.