Judith Torrea, is an award-winning independent investigative blogger, journalist and author based in Ciudad Juárez, México. Torrea´s work spotlights some of the most dire human rights cases in Ciudad Juárez, and analyzes the impact that the war against drugs has on marginalized and poor communities. Her book “Juárez en la sombra” (Aguilar) was already released in Latin America and Spain. Torrea has spent most of her two decades career covering the México/USA Border, with a special emphasis on women rights issues, such as femicides, human trafficking and missing girls.
Janée J. Baugher is the author of two ekphrastic poetry collections, The Body’s Physics (Tebot Bach, 2013) and Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010). She holds degrees from Boston University and Eastern Washington University, and her nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and criticism have been published in nearly 100 journals and anthologies, including The Writer’s Chronicle, The Portland Review, NANO Fiction, and Nimrod. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Bread Loaf Conference participant, Baugher has received grants/awards from Humanities Washington, Richard Hugo House, Jack Straw Foundation, and The Lerman Trust. She’s currently on the editorial staff of Boulevard magazine.
Dana Hemes constructs system-based, visual experiments with human and nonhuman participants to explore interspecies dialogues. She uses functioning, complex systems to challenge anthropocentric thinking and to examine how interspecies interactions can change the meaning of communication. Born in 1986, she grew up in Lafayette, LA. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts from Montclair State University, and a BFA from NYU in Photography and Imaging and Studio Arts. She has been artist-in-residence at Whitecliffe College in Auckland, New Zealand, with the School of Making Thinking, in New York City, and with the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY; and has exhibited at Whitecliffe College, Cardiff School of Art and Design in Wales, and at MagnanMetz Gallery in New York. She has lectured at SVA and at MSU, and lives and works in New York.
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Heather M. O’Brien is an artist based in Los Angeles, where she is exploring how capitalist desire and militaristic legacy construct our ideas about home. In working with photographs, film, installation, performance and writing, her projects seek to build encounters around the illusion of accurate memory, familial archives and the fallacies of the American Dream.
O’Brien’s work has been exhibited in venues across the United States including The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The International Center of Photography, Parsons/The New School, The Photographic Center Northwest, The Bronx River Art Center, Baxter St., Purchase College at SUNY and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her projects have been featured in a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Conveyor Magazine. Her collaborative book project, I see in the sea nothing except the sea. I don’t see a shore. I don’t see a dove., was published in 2015 by Secretary Press. The title is borrowed from Mahmoud Darwish’s book of poetry, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982. Here, however, the endless horizon of the war on terror is considered, in attempt to imagine a shoreline. O’Brien received an MFA from CalArts and currently teaches courses in Photography, Art History and Writing at California State University Long Beach and Moorpark College.