Madison Young (they/she) is an award winning filmmaker, curator, author, community activist and performance artist. They were a member of a group of artists who founded Femina Potens in 2000 to support emerging LGBTQ artists in the bay area. Young was one of the pioneers of the feminist porn movement of the early aughts and their work is included in university course study on the topics feminist and gender studies at universities around the world. Young is the author of three books including Daddy: The Memoir and the writer/director/producer/host of the LGBTQ travel documentary television series - Submission Possible on Revry TV.

Their off-Broadway solo theater performance - Reveal All Fear Nothing - was developed with collaborator Annie Sprinkle and toured the United States from 2016 - 2019. Young is currently in pre-production for a feature film adaptation of their memoir entitled - By The Roots.

Originally from New York City Rocio has been a Bay Area Resident for the past 8+ years. She has a tech day job but is a lifelong artist with most experience in traditional and digital Illustration. She also enjoys creating murals, crafting, making jewelry, sculpture and experimenting with other forms of media.

Mx. Pucks A’Plenty is is the founder and co-producer behind What the Funk?! An All POC Burlesque Festival and the co-producer behind Identities and Expressions: A Virtual Trans & Nonbinary Performing Arts Festival.

Featured in Seattle Pride Magazine, South Seattle Emerald, KUOW, and Seattle Gay News, Mx. Pucks is the founder and board chair of Seattle Burlesque and Cabaret Co-op who operate The Give Inn in Ballard, WA.

Ginger Yifan Chen (they/them) is an interdisciplinary writer, director, and artist based in San Francisco. Their works focus on science fiction, liminal spaces, and immigrant narratives. Ginger is curating ENBY Fest July 2024 at Alchemy Film Festival! Find them online @gingerychen or at gingerychen.com!

Tajianna Okechukwu is an actor and filmmaker based in the Bay Area. She obtained a double degree in Acting and Film & TV Studies from Azusa Pacific University. After graduating, she returned home to appear in commercials & short films as well as direct her own films and music videos. Tajianna has worked largely as a Production Assistant for different well-renowned studios such as Amazon, Marvel, and A24. Her 2019 mini-documentary Flexin’ in My Complexion which explores the effects of colorism on Black women was selected to premiere at the Mbongui Square Festival film screening at Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland. After that, it was installed at the Unbound Roots exhibition at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. Tajianna is curating a program of queer short films on February 23rd 2024 at Alchemy Film Foundation.

Henry Afton (He/Him) is a psychotherapist and aspiring screenwriter with a background in psychoanalytic studies, video and performance art, and music. A neurodiverse man of transgender experience, Henry welcomes the opportunity to create space for brave, honest, and radical storytellers. 

Lex Sloan is the Executive Director at The Roxie Theater in San Francisco and one of the founders of the Bay Area Media Maker Summit. Lex graduated with an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University and a BA in Social Change Media from Western Washington University. Sloan is a devoted member LGBTQ+ filmmaking community and is committed to ensuring that queer history is preserved and shared through the power of cinema.

Meliza Bañales (she/they) aka Missy Fuego was a 2016 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Best LGBT Debut Fiction for their novel Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific. She served as Lecturer in Creative Writing at UC San Diego from 2015-2020. In addition to creating daring work across more than two decades of books and anthologies, Meliza has received praise from feminist and queer magazines like Autostraddle and Bustle. Meliza was dedicated to the slam poetry scene of 1990s and early 2000s San Francisco Bay, served as an anti-violence community partner and hate crimes awareness advocate since 2001, taught at UC San Diego, and now lives in Los Angeles and the Central Coast. Their next book, roōt for the underdog, arrives October 25th, 2022. 

Annie M. Sprinkle is an internationally known multi-media artist whose work is often studied in History of Performance Art classes, gender studies and film studies at major Universities/Colleges. Sprinkle has continuously toured one-woman theater performances about her life since 1989, such as Post Porn Modernist and Hestory of Porn. One of the pivotal players in the 80’s “sex positive feminist movement,” Ms. Sprinkle’s art work has long championed sex education and equal rights. The film she produced and directed, The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop has played in well over 100 film festivals, at museums and galleries, including at the Guggenheim in NYC. She became the first sex film star to successfully bridge into the world of art, and to earn a Ph.D., which she was awarded from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, in 2002. She is a popular visiting artist at many Universities. Annie Sprinkle’s autobiographical book, Post Porn Modernist broke new ground in art books that included sexually oriented imagery. Her book, Hard Core From the Heart; The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in Performance was published by Continuum Press for the academic market and won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award (2002). Stephens and Sprinkle completed their book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover while in lockdown in 2020. It is currently available for purchase at the University of Minnesota Press.

Elizabeth M. Stephens is a filmmaker, artist, and professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While serving as departmental chair, she developed and gained administrative approval for a new MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice. This unique program launches Fall 2021. Stephens grew up in the heart of rural West Virginia’s coalfields where she forged deep bonds with the Appalachian Mountains, as well as with miners, labor activists, environmentalists, and other mountaineers. These connections inform her ecological knowledge and familiarized her with the use and abuse of corporate propaganda and governmental sleights of hand that turn many people against their own self-interests, and especially ecological ones. Stephens earned a PhD in Performance Studies from UC Davis in 2015 and this intensive philosophical study (focused on environmental art and social justice) honed her understanding of how systemic settler colonial practices, racism and poverty are deeply intertwined with environmental justice. After concentrating on visual and performance art, Stephens produced and directed her first feature documentary, Goodbye Gauley Mountain with Sprinkle. This film won the Santa Cruz Film Festival’s Spirit of Action Prize, a John Michaels Award for Environmental Justice from the Big Muddy Film Festival and was nominated for an environmental prize in the Sheffield Doc Fest in England. Stephens and Sprinkle completed their second feature documentary film, Water Makes Us Wet in 2017. It premiered at documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany and then went on to screen at MoMA, the British Film Institute and the Berlin Festspiele. Stephens was the recipient of the Rydell Fellowship in 2014 and in 2019, she and Sprinkle were awarded the Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Fellowship. During the summer of 2018, they filmed and produced over 64 interviews with environmental/ecological artists throughout the United States. Initially intended for Stephens’ online Environmental Art course, these interviews now form an extensive archive from which their new film will draw. While Stephens served as chair (2017-2020), she and Sprinkle completed their book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. It is currently available for purchase at the University of Minnesota Press. In 2021 Stephens was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship with Annie Sprinkle for their new film, Playing with Fire.