Lazaro Arvizu Jr. (Gabrielino/Tongva) is an artist, educator, musician, and researcher dedicated to the culture of the First Peoples of Los Angeles. Born in the Los Angeles Basin, he is knowledgeable of the landscape and cosmology of the Gabrielino culture. He has worked for over twenty years facilitating creative and meaningful cultural experiences to people of all ages and walks of life.
Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles. Her practice, The Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Her work Not A Cornfield (2005–2006) transformed an industrial brownfield (now the Los Angeles State Historic Park) into a cornfield for one agricultural cycle. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River, utilizes the city’s first private water right to deliver 106 acre-feet of water annually from the Los Angeles River to more than 50 acres of land in downtown LA.
Nancy Baker Cahill is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid practice focuses on systemic power, consciousness, and the human body. She creates research-based immersive experiences, video installations, and conceptual blockchain projects rooted in the history of drawing. Her monumental augmented reality (AR) artworks extend and subvert the lineage of land art, often highlighting the climate crisis, civics, and a desire for more equitable futures. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free, AR public art platform exploring site interventions, resistance, and inclusive creative expression.
Tina Calderon is a Culture Bearer of Gabrielino Tongva, Chumash, and Yoeme descent. She is also a traditional singer, dancer, storyteller, and poet who strives to honor her ancestors and inspire others to respect the lands, water, sacred elements, and environment. Tina mentors several youth groups and works with various environmental organizations. She consults for schools, serves on several boards, and holds a few advisory positions, all in the educational and environmental fields.
Founded by Diné artist, activist, and community organizer Emma Robbins, The Chapter House is a Los-Angeles based organization that provides a space for Indigenous Peoples and allies to appreciate art, convene and collaborate, celebrate individual and shared Indigenous cultures, and explore the complexities of the twenty-first century Indigenous experience. In addition to her work with The Chapter House, Robbins is Director of the Navajo Water Project, where she is working to create infrastructure that brings clean running water to the one in three Navajo families without it.
Alison De La Cruz (she/DeLa) is a senior artivist leader, facilitator, cultural organizer, multidisciplinary theatre artist, educator, contemporary ritualist, and elder. For over thirty years DeLa has been facilitating circles and spaces for youth, strangers, neighbors, friends, colleagues, and collaborators to explore diverse communities and break down bias and systemic inequity. De La Cruz has collaborated with local artists and produced community events of all sizes, developing Los Angeles’s world-class cultural ecosystem for over twenty years. DeLa’s artistic work has been presented at venues across the country including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and The David Henry Hwang Theatre at East West Players. As a gathering practitioner, DeLa currently produces the circle for the LA County multi-community song, drum, dance, circle practices known as FandangObon.
Rooted in culturally-based sustainability practices, FandangObon honors the balance between mother earth and humanity by bringing together Japanese, Mexican, and African American communities into one circle through participatory music, dance, and gardening practices.
Fulcrum Arts advances collaboration at the intersection of art and science to impact positive social change on a civic scale through exhibitions, institutional partnerships, interdisciplinary symposia, festivals, residencies, and outreach education.
Sharon Chohi Kim’s work as a voice artist, performer, and composer includes immersive experimental opera, performance art, improvisation, sound art, and site-specific space activation through movement and voice. As a Korean American female artist, she is interested in human connection across cultures and generations, transgenerational trauma of the Korean diaspora, and domestic and sexual violence. Through improvisation, she explores human and non-human states of being, enthusiastically discovering new ways in which her voice can sound. Sharon Chohi has performed with the LA Philharmonic, the Industry Opera Company, Long Beach Opera, MOCA, at Walt Disney Hall, the Broad Museum, the Getty Center and Villa, in caves, tunnels, mountains, gardens, and in water.
Meztli Projects is an Indigenous based arts & culture collaborative centering Indigeneity into the creative practice of Los Angeles by using arts-based strategies to support, advocate for, and organize to highlight Native/Indigenous Artists and systems-impacted youth. Meztli Projects operates out of Apachianga (East Los Angeles) in Tovaangar (Los Angeles County), lands stewarded since time immemorial by families and villages now known as the Acjachemen, Chumash, Tataviam, and Tongva Tribal Nations.
Nobuko Miyamoto is a songwriter, dance and theater artist, and the founder of Great Leap. She uses art as a form of activism to reclaim history, identity, and build solidarity among communities of color. A veteran of Broadway and film, she found her own voice as a troubadour in the ‘70s Asian American movement. Across five decades, Nobuko has forged a creative practice thriving on community and collaboration, most recently co-producing with Quetzal Flores, FandangObon, and Eco-Arts Festival. Her memoir is titled Not Yo’ Butterfly (University of California Press, 2021).