PLAYA ALUMNI

Klamath and Modok storyteller Paul Robert Wolf Wilson has focused his lens on the confluence of place, peoples, and time. As climate crises impact lands and waters and indigenous communities, Wilson works to bring light to the renaissance of place-based peoples...

Originally from Honolulu, Hawai`i, Kanani Miyamoto currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she practices art, teaches, and curates. She is of mixed heritage and identifies most with her Hawaiian and Japanese roots, celebrated in her artwork. Miyamoto holds a Master...

Lofanitani Aisea is a Black Indigenous interdisciplinary multimedia experimental performance artist, writer, filmmaker, and storyteller who is Modoc, Klamath, Tahlequah, Black, and Tongan. Her practice fuses film, movement, sound, and performance to uplift and explore...

Ian Madin (he/him) grew up spending summers backpacking in California’s Sierra Nevada, and in later years rafting and kayaking rivers in California, Oregon and Idaho. His love of the outdoors led him to study geology, earning a BA from UC Berkeley in 1980. Ian...

Barry Baker (he/him) is a forensic biologist and the Deputy Director of the U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon. As a scientist, he supervises an interdisciplinary team of biologists and forensic experts in combating international...

Kirstyn Wright (she/her) is an artist working with the land, animals, and other people in rural areas to investigate how society creates value systems based on an entity's productivity. Her interests and interrogations deal with the lore surrounding The American West...

Jessica Reisch is a new media artist, designer, and educator with an MFA in Computer Arts from the School of Visual Arts and a BA in Education Studies from Brown University. Her interdisciplinary practice draws on networked connections between art, technology, and the...

Adie Steckel (they/she) lives in Portland, Oregon where they are an editor of the small press Fonograf Editions and work for an HIV/AIDS & LGBTQ+ health and social services organization. Their writing appears in Action Spectacle, A Dozen Nothing, Afternoon...

Maria Pinto (she/her) is a Boston-area writer and educator. She teaches creative writing through various community organizations and fosters outdoor literacy as a board member at Hale Education. Her work has appeared in Orion Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Frigg,...

Paul DeMarinis (any) has been making noises with wires, batteries and household appliances since the age of four. He studied film with Paul Sharits at Antioch College and electronic music with Robert Ashley at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and...

Dana Morrison (she/her) lives and works in San Francisco, California. She obtained her MFA in Studio Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016, and her BFA in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010. Dana has been recognized through a...

Brie Schettle (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art and ecology with a background in painting, printmaking, installation, photography, and video. Schettle holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Boise State University and a BFA in...

Rebecca Cummins (she/her) is inspired by science, its history, and instrumentation. She explores the possibilities of light, optics and natural phenomena in installations that have included a machine for making rainbows, a photographic rifle, sun and moon pointers,...

Ari Laurel (she/her) is a fiction writer in Seattle who writes about decolonial futures, climate, and the Pacific Northwest. She primarily draws from her experience as a racial justice community organizer in Missoula and a labor organizer in Seattle. Her stories are...

Julia Solano (she/they) is a vaguely nomadic plein air landscape painter, participatory researcher and designer, natural builder, and risograph printmaker from Oakland, California of Ilokano and Bisayan descent. She studied Design through Engineering and Architecture...

Alex Arzt (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, gardener, and grant writer based in Oakland, CA. Rooted in a connection to place and material explorations, she facilitates connections between human and nonhuman spaces by creating projects in the form of...

Jaclyn Moyer (she/her) is the author of On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family from Punjab to California. Her essays and journalism have appeared in The Atlantic, High Country News, Guernica, Orion, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, and other...

Holly Devon (she/her) is a New Orleans based writer, editor, and collaborative artist.

Katie Miller (she/her) was born and raised in the wilderness of Northeastern Minnesota's Iron Range, but is now deeply rooted in the Pacific Northwest. Miller’s interdisciplinary practice is situated at the intersection of art, architecture, and science, and is rooted...

Scott Kildall (he/him) creates artwork that transforms hidden data from the natural environment, such as water quality, air quality and plant data into sculptural sound installations and performances. He uses custom electronics to create generative, data-driven...

Anna Leahy (she/her) books include the poetry collections If in Some Cataclysm, What Happened Was:, and Aperture and the nonfiction book Tumor. Her work has won top awards from Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood and appears at Aeon,...

Kerry Davis (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, installation and assemblage. His work often recontextualizes mainstream imagery to critique sociopolitical views and the commodification of the natural world. By delving into the...

Charlie Wilcox (he/they) is a designer, animator, embroiderist, musician, artist, collaborator, and friend who hails from Lindstrom, Minnesota, also known as “America’s Little Sweden.” Charlie’s social practice involves exploring what it means to turn the creation of...

Christopher Rose (he/they) is originally from Seattle, Washington and currently resides in Portland, Oregon. He has received grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, Jade District/Midway Artist Placemakers Project, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and is a 2019...