Jesús I. Valles is a queer, Mexican immigrant, educator, writer-performer, and storyteller from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas. Jésus is a recipient of the 2025 Writing Freedom Fellowship with Haymarket Books and the winner of the 2025 Bruntwood Prize International Playwriting Award. They are a 2018 Undocupoets fellow and their work has been most recently featured in the anthologies, Here to Stay and Somewhere We Are Human. 

Camilo Godoy is a New York-based artist. His interdisciplinary projects have been presented at the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, OCDChinatown, PROXYCO Gallery, Danspace Project, Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Moody Center, UNSW Galleries, and Museum Folkwang, among others. Godoy currently teaches at Parsons School of Design, School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, and Whitney Museum. He is a co-founder of QUEEROCRACY, a New York City-based grassroots organization that promotes social and economic justice through direct action, community engagement, and education.

Blanka Amezkua is a New York City-based contemporary artist, fusing and combining many diverse and seemingly disparate elements into bold, colorful art.

Maria Ponce Sevilla is the Director of Development at Mixteca Organization Inc., bringing over 10 years of experience in the non-profit sector, particularly with undocumented immigrant communities in NYC and deported or returned youth in Mexico. 

Marco Saavedra is a political refugee and Indigenous Mixteca painter from Oaxaca, Mexico. He works at his family’s mutual aid restaurant, La Morada, in the South Bronx, New York, building something that’s new.

J. Siegert is a cellist and composer in Musicambia’s Flagship Program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. He composed The Price of Freedom in 2024 for himself and his fellow students to play. Siegert was inspired by the plight of refugees and migrants who give up everything they know in search of a better life. The piece moves through stages of sleep—including REM in the middle—to awakening at the end.

P. Cortez is a guitarist, vocalist, and composer in Musicambia’s Flagship Program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. He composed La Bailadora del Vientre in 2025. Cortez was inspired by the solo string music of J.S. Bach. The piece is a set of dances, in 3 movements.

Rev. Juan Carlos Ruíz is a pastor of The Lutheran Church of The Good Shepherd, where he supports migrants through mutual aid programs.

Maggie Loredo is a mujer practicante narrativa with over ten years of experience in translocal advocacy, organizing, and accompanying undocumented, deported, and forcibly returned families between Mexico and the US. She grew up undocumented in Texas & Georgia and was coerced to return to Mexico in 2008. Since 2013, she has acompañado and participated in organizational processes with deportees and forced returnees in Mexico.

Wendy Vogt is an associated professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Her book, Lives in Transit: Violence and Intimacy on the Migrant Journey, chronicles the dangerous journeys of Central American migrants crossing Mexico and is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in humanitarian aid shelters and other transit sites.

Katy Long is the executive director of the California Migration Museum. She works on refugee and migration issues both as an academic researcher and a writer and journalist. She is senior research associate at the Refugee Law Initiative, University of London, and presented the BBC series Century of Exile.

Robert Sember is an assistant professor in Interdisciplinary Arts at Eugene Lang College at The New School. He is consistently curious to see how art or culture makes shapes, challenges, and expands theoretical propositions and helps us address the big social and life questions of our time.