Born to immigrants from Kaiping, China, Lena Chen (b. 1987, San Francisco) was raised in the San Gabriel Valley, an Asian ethnoburb of Los Angeles built on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva people. She is a social practice artist, cultural organizer, and scholar working across performance, moving image, installation, poetry, and new media. Her work explores race, gender, labor, and sexuality often through the lens of her own experience as a mother, former sex worker, and survivor of revenge porn. She has developed projects with birth workers, trauma survivors, abortion providers, sex workers, mothers, and other communities navigating systems of care, labor, and exclusion.

She is co-founder of JADED, the largest Asian American and Pacific Islander contemporary arts platform in Western Pennsylvania, and BAD ASIANS, which uplifts queer and feminist AAPI performance, visual culture, and scholarship. A recipient of awards from Mozilla Foundation, Sundance Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies, she recently served on the Public Artists in Development (PAiD) Artist Council for Los Angeles County.

Currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Performance Studies, she studies how Asian American artists, sex workers, and community organizers use performance to cultivate consent, kinship, and solidarity. She holds a MFA in Fine Art from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA in Sociology from Harvard University.

Kimberly Robertson is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, a Professor of American Indian Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and an artist. She was born and raised in Bakersfield, CA and has spent the last two decades living and working in Los Angeles on unceded Tongva lands. She earned a PhD in Women’s Studies from UCLA in 2012 and co-founded Meztli Projects in 2018.

Her creative practices center Native feminisms, kinship, storytelling, decolonization, and Indigenous futurities and currently include beadwork, screen printing, collage, installation art, and zine-making. She utilizes high-femme aesthetics to address the myriad forms of violence that accompany racialized capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy while also encouraging viewers to consider the radical practice of making joy and laughter in service of collective healing and liberation.

Her artworks have been exhibited in numerous community, university, public, and private galleries as well as peer-reviewed monographs and anthologies. Robertson’s first solo-exhibition, Diary of a Native Femme(nist) was hosted by the Chapter House in the spring of 2024. She is also an active member of the Los Angeles Indian community and facilitates beading circles and art-making workshops with Native and non-Native communities both locally and nationally.

John Ziqiang Wu (b. 1983, Tangshan, China) is an artist and educator based in Southern California. Working across drawing, painting, installation, artist books, and teaching, his practice explores the relationships between art, education, family, and everyday life, often reflecting on how people learn art and how art is valued through personal experiences and institutions.

Wu received his BFA from ArtCenter College of Design and his MFA from CalArts. His work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries including SALT Istanbul, Night Gallery, Todd Madigan Gallery at California State University, Bakersfield, Armory Center for the Arts, ArtCenter College of Design, and The Brick LA. He has published several artist books, including Dad’s Hands Are Smaller and Learning Art and Art Learning Society. He was an Artist in Residence at the Hammer Museum in 2019 and contributed an artist project to X-TRA in 2022.