��������

Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts and a Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies from Arizona State University. Cortez’s work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. She has had solo exhibitions at the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Clockshop, Los Angeles (2018); Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2016), among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019); Ballroom Marfa, TX (2019); Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017), and many others. She teaches in the Department of Central American Studies at California State University, Northridge. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.

Melissa Barba is an independent art consultant and curator. For the past seven years, she served as the Assistant Director of the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she oversaw development, museum education and community outreach, grant writing and multidisciplinary curatorial projects, among other things. Prior to her time at the Rubin, Melissa worked at the El Paso Museum of Art as the Education Curator, and also for the Ysleta Independent School District as the Visual Arts Instructional Specialist and Gallery Curator. Some of the committee’s she served on includes, El Paso Museum and Cultural Affairs Department’s Public Arts Committee, the El Paso Community Foundation’s Cultural Education Committee and the El Paso Museum of Arts Education Advisory Board. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Incarnate Word, and a teaching certification in Art Education and an M.A. in Art History with a Concentration in Contemporary Mexican Art from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Sommer Browning is an author, curator, and artist living in Denver. Her books include two collections of poetry Backup Singers and Either Way I'm Celebrating (Birds, LLC), as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book You're On My Period (Counterpath), and others. In 2017, she founded GEORGIA, an art space in her garage in Denver. Her poetry, art writing, and visual art has appeared in Hyperallergic, Bomb, jubilat, Chicago Review, Entropy, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at the Auraria Library at the University of Colorado Denver.