Việt Lê‘s (b. 1976, Hồ Chí Minh City) creative and critical practice as a queer, disabled artist focuses on sexualities, spiritualities, the physical and the metaphysical, working across experimental film, ritual performance, “pain-tings,” power objects/installations, and text toward healing. Expanding definitions of “trans,” “trance,” and “medium,” their work explores various corporeal aspects—sight, sound, touch, smell, taste—as modalities of embodied knowing.

Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements (Duke University Press, 2021), which received the 2023 Outstanding Book Award in Media and Visual Culture from the Association of Asian American Studies. They are Professor Emeritus at California College of the Arts (former Chair, Visual & Critical Studies graduate program).

As a 2022-24 Headlands Bay Area Fellow and '22 Stanford CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellow, Lê has presented work at venues including the Shanghai Biennale, the Smithsonian, and Rio Gay Film Festival. Recent solo exhibitions include trăng trắng | milk moon (2026, Artpace San Antonio) thường (2025, University of Virginia and Virginia Tech), đến đèn đen (2024, sàn art | Saigon), and Việt Namaste (2023, Headlands Center for the Arts). Focused on global south indigenous shamanisms and knowledge traditions, Lê founded the non-profit SEA sạ (seasal.org) to share resources and wisdom among artists, healers, and researchers, and continues their training and practice as thầy đồng (a Vietnamese indigenous shaman-monk) through various mediums.

Anh Tấn (Sài Gòn) is one of Việt Nam’s most renowned instrumentalists and performers of chầu văn—traditonal folk ritual singing, recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage. Awarded the prestigious Meritorious Artist (Nghệ sĩ Ưu tú) title in 2024—a national Vietnamese honor—he has toured internationally, performing at world-class music venues for over two decades. Anh Tấn is actively dedicated to preserving traditional music—particularly the art forms of hát văn and hát xẩm—and bringing them closer to contemporary audiences.

A familiar face in the Vietnamese folk music scene, Anh Tấn plays a wide range of traditional instruments and specializes in playing lutes, particularly the kìm and đàn nguyệt (a two-stringed, moon-shaped lute).

Jay Carlon is a Los Angeles based artist working across performance, film, installation, and community gathering. His practice explores migration, postcolonial identity, queer futurity, grief, ritual, and collective healing. Rooted in interdisciplinary collaboration and site-responsive performance, Carlon blurs the boundaries between dance, visual art, experimental sound, and social practice.

His work has been presented nationally and internationally by organizations including The Lincoln Center, Bangkok 1899, REDCAT, The Broad, and Center for Art and Performance UCLA. Carlon is a recipient of the Ellis-Beurregard Choreographer Award, the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Grant, California Arts Council Established Artist Fellowship, and named Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch.” Alongside his choreographic work, he has contributed to community-based organizing and artistic platforms centering Filipino, queer, diasporic, culinary, and experimental performance practices.

Through intimate and large-scale works alike, Carlon creates spaces that invite audiences into shared experiences of embodiment, memory, transformation, and care.

Mateo Rodriguez (b. 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Texas. Native to San Antonio, Rodriguez explores subculture through music and communal practice(s). His focus in music is highly regional and aims to elucidate the history and impact of punk and soul on Chicanx communities in Texas and across the country. Since 2023, Rodriguez has routinely traveled throughout the Pacific Northwest, documenting demolition derby events and the communities that host them. Taking portraits and interviewing the locals, this three year endeavor aims to ethnographically document the profound results of shared creative labor and controlled destruction.

Christine-Yến Tran has been a fourth generation Mother Goddess spirit medium since age 8, despite being born in Orange County, CA. She is also a third generation eldest daughter, which informs her care and duties in family life and community work. Before becoming a mom, she worked in technology as a marketing operations professional and also served as Managing Director of the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association between 2020 and 2023, leading digital arts and volunteer programs for Viet Film Fest and Viet Book Fest. Her art, which explored her family’s different diasporic experiences, was shown at Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in 2015 in VAALA’s art exhibition, Generations: 40 Hues Between Black and White.

Janet Hoskins is Emerita Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Divine Eye and the Diaspora; Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism (2015) and the contributing editor of Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (with Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2014). She wrote three books about Sumba, Indonesia: The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on History, Calendars and Exchange (1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies), Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (1998) and Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (1996). She has also written and produced one ethnographic film about Vietnam “The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California” and two ethnographic films about Sumba, “Horses of Life and Death” and “Feast in Dream Village”, all distributed by Documentary Educational Resources. She writes about indigenous religions, spirit possession practices, and the connections between homelands and diasporas.