Favianna Rodriguez is a celebrated printmaker, founding member of the Eastside Arts Alliance, artistic director and co-owner of Tumi’s Design, and co-founder of the Taller Tupac Amaru screenprinting collective, and radio correspondent for KPFA’s Hard Knock Radio.
Pamela Penniston is a founder and Executive Director of Qcc – The Center for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Art & Culture and Artistic Director of the National Queer Arts Festival. She designed sets for theatre, television and computer graphics, receiving 7 gold medals for graphics and Art Direction from the Broadcast Design Association. She has worked as a writer, workshop/trainer and designer for Cultural Odyssey, particularly The Medea Project, Theater for Incarcerated Women.
V. Vale is the publisher and primary contributor to books and magazines published by his company, RE/Search Publications. Vale, who is the host of the television talk show Counterculture Hour on public access channel 29 in San Francisco, studied English at UC Berkeley, and is a Japanese-American.
In 1977, he began publication of Search and Destroy, a San Francisco-based zine documenting the then-current punk subculture. In 1980, he began publication of RE/Search, a tabloid format zine focusing on various counterculture and underground topics. The 1980s saw the expansion of RE/Search from a tabloid format zine to a publisher of books. Vale published and contributed to many books on the subjects of pranks; obscure music and films; industrial culture; authors J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs; modern primitives; and many other underground topics.
Rebeka Rodriguez is the Program Director of Education and Community Engagement at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. She has worked for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area as a photographer and community organizer.
Meliza Bañales is a spoken-word artist and the author of and I’ve Been Fighting Ever Since (Chula Press, 2002) and Girl with the Glass Throat (Chula Press, 2001). She has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines including Transfer, Las Girlfriends, and Revolutionary Voices, the latter of which was nominated for a Lambda Book Award in 2001. She’s been called “the girl with the sense of humor of a jackknife.” The first Latina ever to win a Bay Area Grand Slam Championship, she’s been on three national poetry slam teams and has also competed as an individual at the nationals. She is the winner of the Burning Bush Press People Before Profits Poetry Prize 2002.
L.A. “Happy” Hyder is a self-taught American-Lebanese photographer, assemblage and installation artist whose photos of architectural details are intended to engage the viewer to see with a different eye. As founder and Director of LVA: Lesbians in the Visual Arts, she travels frequently; opportunities to photograph the details of various cities. She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows, locally and nationally. Her photos have appeared in numerous newsletters, catalogs and books including The Color Purple, author photo, Visionary Voices: Women on Power and Anything You Love Can Be Saved essays and letters of Alice Walker.