Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

Randall Mann

Poet, Critic, and Professor of Writing at Bennington College

A queer poet, critic, and medical writer, Randall Mann is the author of five poetry collections: Complaint in the Garden, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, Straight Razor, Proprietary, and A Better Life. He is also the author of a book of criticism, essays, and interviews, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry. His writing has appeared in TheAdroit Journal, Lit Hub, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, ...

Ajuan Mance

Visual Artist, Author, Editor, and a Professor of Ethnic Studies and English at Mills College

Ajuan Mance is a Professor of African American literature at Mills College in Oakland, California. A lifelong artist and writer, Ajuan has participated in solo and group exhibitions as well as comic and zine fests, from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. In her art, illustration, and comics, Ajuan uses humor and bright colors to explore race, gender, power, and the people and places in which they intersect. Her work has appeared in a number of digital and print media outlets, including, most recently, The Women’s Review of Books, Blavity.com, BET.com, Transition...

Wendy MacNaughton

Illustrator and Graphic Journalist

Wendy MacNaughton is an illustrator and graphic journalist based in San Francisco. MacNaughton has published eleven books, including three New York Times best-sellers. MacNaughton's work combines illustration, journalism, and social work to tell the stories of overlooked people and places. Her art has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, Juxtapoz, GOOD, Time Out NY, 7x7, and Gizmodo. She has created magazine cover images for 7x7 and Edible SF. Her illustrated documentary series, "Meanwhile," was first published in The Rumpus in 2010, then in 2014 as a book, Meanwhile in...

Jean Ma

Scholar of Film and Media History and Theory and Former Professor in Film and Media Studies Program at Stanford

Jean Ma is a scholar of film and media history and theory, with specializations in Asian cinema, gender, sexuality, sound studies, and moving image art. Her books include Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema; Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema; and Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. She serves on the editorial board of Film Quarterly and is coeditor of the book series Music, Sound, and Media at the University of California Press.

From 2006 to 2023 she taught at Stanford University, where she...

tanea lunsford lynx

Writer and Professor of Social Justice and Ethnic Studies at City College of San Francisco

tanea lunsford lynx (pronouns flexible) is a writer, abolitionist, and fourth generation Black San Franciscan on both sides.

tanea is a proud alum of Voices of Our Nation (VONA) and the Lambda Literary Retreat. In 2023 tanea grew her showings of multidisciplinary work to include her first solo exhibition (we were here) at the San Francisco Main Library and an interactive exhibit (I Used to Live Here) as a part of MUNI RAISED ME at SOMArts. in They’ve been a featured artist in the National Queer Arts Festival twice: in 2023 they curated and hosted “...

Maya Lin

Architect, Designer, and Sculptor

Maya Lin is known for her large-scale environmental artworks, her architectural works and her memorial designs. Her unique multi-disciplinary career has “resisted categories, boundaries and borders” (Michael Brenson). In her book Boundaries, she writes I see myself existing between boundaries, a place where opposites meet; science and art, art and architecture, East and West. My work originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings.”

Nature and the environment have long been central concerns for Lin who attended Yale...

Cannupa Hanska Luger

Multidisciplinary Artist

Cannupa Hanska Luger (b.1979) is a New Mexico based multidisciplinary artist creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity. Incorporating ceramics, steel, fiber, video and repurposed materials, Luger activates speculative fiction, engages in land-based actions of repair and practices empathetic response through social collaboration. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and...

Miguel A. López

Writer and Former Chief Curator/Co-Director at TEOR/ética

Miguel A. López is a writer and curator. In his practice, he focuses on the role of art in politics and public life, collective work and collaborative dynamics, and queer and feminist rewritings of history. He is a co-curator for the 2024 edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art. From 2015 to 2020, he worked as Chief Curator, and later Co-director at TEOR/éTica, Costa Rica. Previously, López was curator of Lugar a Dudas, Colombia, in 2012-2013. In 2014, he curated the section Deus é bicha (God is Queer) and the presentation of Giuseppe Campuzano’s Transvestite...

Alan Pelaez Lopez

Poet, Installation, and Adornment Artist

Alan Pelaez Lopez, Ph.D., was born in Mexico and constantly migrated between the state of Mexico, Mexico City, and Oaxaca’s Costa Chica. At five, Pelaez Lopez migrated alone to the United States, undocumented. As a minor, Pelaez Lopez began to make jewelry as a source of income, which is where they found their passion for art.

In 2010, Pelaez Lopez became artistically, socially, and politically involved in the immigrant rights movement as DREAM Act votes were about to take place. In 2011, after the legislation failed, Pelaez Lopez helped organize...

Lili Loofbourow

Staff writer at Slate

Lili Loofbourow is a staff writer at Slate. Before that, The Week. An essay of hers was in Best American Essays 2019, and she won the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Staige D. Blackford Prize for Creative Nonfiction for The Male Glance in...