BIOGRAPHIES

Jen White-Johnson is a disabled and Neurodivergent Afro-Latina, art activist and design educator whose visual work aims to uplift disability justice narratives in design. Jen uses visual art to explore the intersection of content and caregiving, emphasizing redesigning ableist visual culture. Her creative practice shines best when she can infuse design justice, disability justice, and art activism to center Afro-Latine and Neurodivergent creativity, care work, and joy as essential acts of resistance. Jen lives with Graves disease and ADHD, and her heart-centered and electric approach to disability advocacy bolsters these movements with invaluable currencies: influential, dynamic art and media that all at once educates, bridges divergent worlds, and builds a future that mirrors her Autistic son’s experience.

Born and raised in an Indigenous community in the remote Brazilian Amazon, Zaya Guarani (b. 2001) belongs to a line of strong women who have led their communities as both shamans and spiritual guides. Continuing her ancestral tradition of political and spiritual engagement, Zaya has chosen to dedicate her platform as an internationally renowned model to the ongoing global struggle for Indigenous rights and climate justice.

A member of the powerful Kamurape and Guarani Mbya ethnicities, Zaya initially infused her traditional Indigenous upbringing with a german school education after earning a scholarship in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 16. Shortly thereafter, Zaya was spotted by Dayana Molina, a prominent Brazilian Indigenous rights advocate, stylist, and columnist, with whom Zaya would found the first Indigenous Creative Collective (featured in Vogue Brazil and Elle Brazil) dedicated to Indigenous representation in the fashion world.

Zaya has recently been embraced as an advisor board member at Slow Factory Institute.

As part of her program of cultural engagement, Zaya delivered the closing remarks at the 2022 Venice Film Festival’s Masterclass of The Territory, an award-winning documentary filmed near Zaya’s community in Rondônia, Brazil. Fortified by distinguished mentors in global fashion and entertainment Zaya has a unique opportunity to elevate her community’s message and influence the cultural sector.

Vivien Sansour is an artist, researcher, and writer. She uses installations, images, sketches, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for seed conservation and the protection of agrobiodiversity as a cultural/ political act. Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library in 2014 where she worked with farmers in Palestine and around the world. As an extension of this project she created The Traveling Kitchen, a social engagement project aimed at bringing to the forefront conversations about climate crisis, food politics, and the imagining of new worlds. Her work as an artist has been showcased internationally, in places such as The Chicago Architecture Biennale, Victoria and Albert Museum, Dutch Design Week, Berlinale, Istanbul Biennale, Fotoindustria, and the Venice Art Biennale. As a writer,

Vivien has written for magazines such as E-fluxx, Mold Magazine, and The Forward where she was featured as a food columnist. An enthusiastic cook, Vivien works to bring threatened varieties “back to the dinner table to become part of our living culture rather than a relic of the past.” This work has led her to collaborate with awardwinning chefs, including Anthony Bourdain and Sammi Tamimi.

A former Harvard University Fellow, Vivien is currently the Distinguished Artistic Fellow at Bard College where she premiered her art performance, “The Belly is A Garden” at the Fisher Center for Performing Arts and the Bard farm. As part of her fellowship Vivien is teaching in the Experimental Humanities department where she is developing a course on human and nature design in the Hudson Valley entitled, “The Belly is A Garden”- El Batin Bustan 20222023.

Xin Liu (b. 1991, Xinjiang/China) is an artist and engineer. Xin is the Arts Curator in the Space Exploration Initiative at MIT Media Lab and an artist-in-residence at SETI Institute. She creates experiences/experiments to take measurements in our personal, social, and technological spaces in a post-metaphysical world: between gravity and homeland, sorrow and the composition of tears, gene sequencing, and astrology. Her recent research and interest center around the verticality of space, extraterrestrial explorations, and cosmic metabolism. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including Porches Chinese Young Artist of the Year 2021, Forbes 30 under 30 Asia, X Museum Triennial Award, the Van Lier Fellowship from the Museum of Arts and Design, Sundance New Frontier Story Lab, SXSW Interactive Innovation Award, Core 77 Interaction Design Award, Fast Company Innovation by Design Award, among others. Xin’s transdisciplinary work is widely covered by international media including NY Times, Nature, Wallpaper, VICE, Scientific American and Artforum. aja monet is a blues surrealist poet and cultural worker. In 2007, she won the legendary Nuyorican Poet’ s Cafe Grand slam poetry award title. she follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets participating and assembling in social movements. aja monet has collaborated across mediums and disciplines helping to shape and shift culture working with many internationally established artists, scholars, activists, and organizers. Her first full collection of poems entitled, “my mother was a freedom fighter” is a testament to all mothers, women, and girls who struggle to live, love, and move freely in the world. Her poems explore migration, spirituality, and femininity. In 2018, her book was nominated for a NAACP Image Award for Poetry and in 2019 she was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry. aja monet also serves as the Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls. In 2022, she created an audio play called, VOICES, showcasing the stories and experiences of Black women across the diaspora and the African continent. As well, she is currently working on her next full collection of poems and her debut poetry album to be released in 2023.

Elena Ketelsen González is a writer and curator based in Queens, New York. Currently, she is an Assistant Curator at MoMA

PS1, where she has worked to organize activations of Homeroom, a space that amplifies the work of collectives, organizations, and artists that are connected to PS1’s program. These collaborations have included Nuevayorkinos: Essential and Excluded (2021) with the filmmaker and archivist Djali Brown-Cepeda, Black Trans Liberation: Remembrance and Mourning (2021) with Qween Jean, and The Revolution is a School (2022) with Slow Factory. Previously, she held programming positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of the City of New York, among others. She frequently presents and lectures at universities and other institutions.

Antionette Carroll is the Founder, President and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab, a nonprofit educating and deploying youth to challenge racial and health inequities impacting Black and Latinx populations, and the newly created Institute of Equitable Design and Justice. Within this role, Antionette has pioneered an award-winning form of creative problem solving called EquityCentered Community Design

(named a Fast Company World Changing Idea Finalist) and a new leadership model called Redesigner for Justice. Through this capacity, Antionette has received several recognitions and awards including being named an Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellow, Roddenberry Fellow, Echoing Green Global Fellow, TED Fellow, ADCOLOR Innovator, SXSW Community Service Honoree, Camelback Ventures Fellow, and Essence Magazine Woke 100. Additionally, Antionette has been featured in Empathy for Change by Amy J. Wilson, Fast Company Innovation by Design: Creative Ideas That Transform the Way We Live and Work by Stephanie Mehta, and the Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work by Jess Rimington and Joanna L. Cea. In her “free” time, Antionette is a civic and equity design coach and international speaker.

Dr. Vandana Shiva, a worldrenowned environmental thinker, activist, feminist, philosopher of science, writer and science policy advocat, is the founder of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (India) and President of Navdanya International. Trained as a Physicist at the University of Punjab, she completed her Ph.D. on the ‘Hidden Variables and Nonlocality in Quantum Theory’ from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She later shifted to interdisciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India. In 1982 she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE), an independent research institute that addresses the most significant problems of ecology of our times, and two years later, Navdanya (‘nine seeds’) the movement in defense of biodiversity and small farmers. In 2011 she founded Navdanya International in Italy and is Chairman of the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, co-founded with the then President of the Region of Tuscany. Recipient of many awards, including in 1993 the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’, and named among the top five “Most Important People in Asia” by AsiaWeek in 2001. Shes is a prolific writer and author of numerous books and serves on the board of the International Forum on Globalization, and member of the executive committee of the World Future Council.

Ijeoma Oluo is a writer, speaker and internet yeller. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk

About Race and most recently, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. Her work on race has been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post, among many other publications. She was named to the 2021 TIME 100 Next list and has twice been named to the Root 100. She received the 2018 Feminist Humanist Award and the 2020 Harvard Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

Rachel Cargle is an Akron, Ohio born writer, entrepreneur and philanthropic innovation. Her work and upcoming book with Penguin Random House, centers the reimagining of womanhood, solidarity and self and how we are in relationship with ourselves and one another. In 2018 she founded The Loveland Foundation, Inc., a non-profit offering free therapy to

Black women and girls.

Her umbrella company, The Loveland Group houses a collection of Rachel’s social ventures including The Great Unlearn, a self-paced, donationbased learning community, The Great Unlearn for Young Learners – an online learning space for young folks launching in 2022, and Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre – an innovative literacy space designed to amplify, celebrate and honor the work of writers who are often excluded from traditional cultural, social and academic canons.

Rachel is a regular contributor to Cultured magazine, Atmos magazine and The Cut, and has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Forbes, Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker. Rachel lives & loves in Brooklyn, New York.

Wanjiku “Wawa” Gatheru is a climate storyteller passionate about making the climate movement relevant and accessible to everyone. Harnessing her background as a Rhodes Scholar and youth climate activist, Wawa works to bring climate justice to the mainstream. Her goal is to be an effective communicator that helps inspire a generation of “unlikely” environmentalists.