PLAYA ALUMNI

John Oakes (he/him  b. 1961) is a writer whose first book The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without was published in 2024 by Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster and was translated into several languages. He is now working on a book...

Lisa Conrad (she/her) was born in 1963 in New York City, NY. She is an interdisciplinary artist currently working in performance, photography, and video. Her work has been shown in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Minnesota, Ohio, and Baltimore, among other places....

Stephanie Rose’s (she/her) paintings draw upon her vocations in agriculture and gardening, and rural life near wilderness. Curious about her place in the environment, she investigates landscapes from different vantage points. Painting is Rose’s way of being in...

Ray Daniels (they) is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ray’s fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, and they are currently working on a novel.

Sarah Morejohn’s (she/her) fascination with non-linear patterns in nature drives her work. Referencing snow crystals and plants her intricate drawings contemplate how wonder is important to our connection to the world. Morejohn grew up in rural southern Oregon, and...

Sae Jung Oh (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in NYC and Seoul. She works with lossy data and glitch created when technology translates data, and when the brain translates memories. Recently, her interest has centered around ways of looking at a city...

Katharine Haake (she/her) is a fourth generation Californian with a deep connection to the land, the people, and the history of this place. Her recent postworld fable, What Happened Was (2024) inaugurates a new climate change fiction series from 11:11 Press, Nothing...

Julie Perini (she/her) is a filmmaker, daily videomaker, diary keeper, community-based media maker, video artist, writer, artistic descendent of time-benders like Tony Conrad, product of the suburbs of New York City and DIY culture of the 90s. Her involvement with the...

Erin Elder (she/her) is an artist and writer using creative research methods to understand how people and landscapes shape one another. Whether designing a locals-led bus tour, testing an experimental commune, mounting an exhibition, or publishing a book, her projects...

Jay A. Baker (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist enamored with place. Their work flows into three primary tributaries that heavily cross-pollinate: music/sound, collage/mixed-media, and projections/video. All Jay’s work aims to blur boundaries between people...

Kelly Terwilliger is a poet, oral storyteller and maker of art who grew up in a family of biologists. Her work in its various forms delights in multivocality, dialogue, and wonder—that mingling of curiosity and awe which engenders both questions you can answer and...

Patricia Contaxis' writing appears in The Coachella Review, The Loch Raven Review, Pithead Chapel, Wrath-bearing Tree, Rivanna Review, The Pluralist, San Antonio Review, and Notes From The Seashore. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the California...

Shawn Skabelund (MFA, The University of Iowa, 1990) is an artist and curator working in landscapes to reveal their complex issues, ecologies, and cultural histories. For thirty years, he has been a successful site-specific, place-based installation artist, creating...

Rebecca Burrell (she/they) is an emerging interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Portland, Oregon. She is a 2024 graduate of Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she received an MFA in Applied Craft + Design and an MA in Critical Studies. In all her work, she...

Susan Circone is a fiber artist based in the Portland, Oregon area. Her work explores the minutiae of the physical and natural world, finding inspiration in its structures, textures, and forms. The slow process of stitching is used for mark-making and construction,...

Katharine Cashman is a volcanologist who studies links between chemical and physical factors that control magma ascent, eruption, and emplacement on the Earth’s surface. She received her doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University in 1986 and accepted a faculty...

Helen Lessick is a visual and public artist and creative catalyst originally from Philadelphia. She travelled west to earn her BA in Art from Reed College and MFA in Studio Art from the University of California Irvine. She was awarded Pollock Krasner and Bonnie...

Eve Müller lives in Eugene, Oregon with her sweetheart. She has recently published in Camas, Sequestrum, The Writing Disorder, Thieving Magpie, and Empty House. Some of her work has been anthologized, and her chapbook, Guide to the Ruins, was published by Plan B...

Ocean is a disabled novelist, poet, and visual artist working in pararealist themes. www.mirrorflower.org @mirrorflower_ocean  

Stephen Montalvo (b.1984) is an active composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music, as well as audiovisual installation artist, based in New Orleans, LA. Through his music, he explores concepts related to resonance and rhythmic interplay, works to promote...

Grant Cutler (b. USA 1983) is an interdisciplinary artist working with sound, film, photography, textile, and media technologies across installation, performance, and expanded cinema. His current work aims to emphasize listening as a spiritual-erotic experience...

  Matthew Williams (they/them/theirs) is a Baltimore-based dancer, somatic facilitator, and lifelong student of the body. Their performance practice is inspired by the human body as a site for choice, liberation, and a means to be in relationship with place and...

As an outdoor enthusiast and self-described beanbag botanist, Renee Adams finds immediate inspiration in the flora surrounding her home in rural central Washington State. She remains active in the regional arts scene as a curator and member of PUNCH Projects, an art...

Eunsun Choi is a multidisciplinary and conceptual artist born in Korea, currently living in Seattle. She is a graduate of the Hunter College MFA program and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Washington in the DXARTS program. Recent solo...