PLAYA ALUMNI

As an Indian American girl growing up in small-town Colorado, writer-director Shilpa Sunthankar learned everything she knows from the movies: a steady diet of eighties Hollywood, world indie cinema in the nineties, and a hefty side of Bollywood. She'd like to say she...

Ben Lerchin is an artist and technologist who works with software, photography, and digital fabrication. Their practice deals extensively with the relationship between the photographic image and the American West. Reflecting on the uneasy experience of living between...

Stephanie Gottlob is a somatic improvisational movement artist. In 2019 she bought a truck camper and has been on the road for almost 2 years exploring movement improvisation, somatic experience and creative process throughout the various natural biomes of North...

For Rossitza Todorova, it's all about the journey. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, Rossitza Todorova immigrated to the United States as a child. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2005 and her Master of Fine Arts degree in...

David Carmack Lewis began his art career as a newspaper staff artist in the 1980s. His oil paintings explore narrative and metaphor, among the oldest tools of art, to find new meaning in the familiar. His work was featured in a solo exhibition last winter at the Coos...

Robert Hackett (Bob) lives in Talent, Oregon, and is currently Associate Director of Travel Southern Oregon, the state's regional tourism office. From 1998-2017 he worked as Marketing Manager at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and taught American Literature...

Erin Galey is an American film director & producer whose work explores the nuances of empathy, identity, and social justice in the sci-fi, thriller, and drama genres. Her work features dynamic female leads with rich emotional worlds, in stories of woman vs. self...

Adam Davis has been the executive director of Oregon Humanities since 2013 and directed the Center for Civic Reflection before that. Davis has trained thousands of discussion leaders across the country, facilitated hundreds of community and workplace discussions,...

Jill AnnieMargaret received her M.F.A. in Visual Art from California State University Long Beach in 2005 and B.F.A. with distinction from Sonoma State University. She holds a B.S. in Communications from Clarion University. The...

After studying Plant Sciences and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of California, Santa Cruz, Sean Vidal Edgerton completed a graduate program in Science Illustration at California State University, Monterey Bay. Since then, he has worked as a wildlife...

Roger Peet is an artist and printmaker in Portland, OR. His work addresses the contemporary crises of biodiversity and capitalism and what can and can't be done about them. He is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative and coordinates the national...

Riversteadt (River) LaMoreaux, Ph.D. is passionate about interdisciplinarity – she is part writer, part scientist, and part artist. She has published in a wide variety of genres including short play, creative non-fiction, poetry, and academic scientific writing. Her...

She received her MFA from San Francisco State University, is a recipient of the Murphy, Cadogan & Phelan Fellowship, and has been an artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. She publishes artist books and collaborations under the imprint ‘subtext...

Londs Reuter (born 1988) is a dancer and dance-maker based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently choreographing towards the question: what does it take to be brave? Londs has received support from New York Live Arts (Fresh Tracks 2014-2015), Danspace Project (Food...

Paul Skenazy grew up in Chicago, studied at the University of Chicago and Stanford, and taught Literature and Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He reviewed fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Chicago Tribune and other...

Farnaz Fatemi is an Iranian-American writer in Santa Cruz, CA. She is cofounder of the Hive Poetry Collective, which presents a weekly radio show and podcast in Santa Cruz County and hosts readings and poetry-related events. Her poetry and prose appears or is...

Nancy Floyd has been an exhibiting artist for over thirty years. She has received many notable awards including a 2018 Aaron Siskind Photography Fellowship (New York, NY), a 2016-17 CUE Art Foundation Fellowship (New York, NY), a 2015-16 Society for Photographic...

Aaron is a Vancouver-based writer who focuses on young adult fiction for ages fourteen and up. He won the CANSCAIP (Canadian Society of Children’s Authors, Illustrators and Performers) Writing for Children Competition and was a finalist for Hunger Mountain’s Katherine...

Rachel Maxi has been making art in Seattle since arriving here in 1990 from Cincinnati, Ohio where she attended Xavier University. Her work has been shown and collected widely publicly and privately throughout the NorthWest and featured in both the Seattle and Tacoma...

Lisa Conrad is a visual artist, writer, and digital scholarship librarian at California College of the Arts, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been shown in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Minnesota, Ohio, and Baltimore. She received her BA from Bennington...

Lauren Bierly (b. 1986) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist, and an arts administrator. Bierly has exhibited in New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Kolkata, India. She was artist-in-residence at chaNorth (2018); Starry Night (2017); Panoply Performance Lab...

Emily Meg Weinstein’s work has appeared in Salon, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Longreads, Climbing, Rock and Ice, Electric Literature, The Billfold, The Hairpin, The Huffington Post, and other publications and anthologies. Her essay, “Mating Habits of the Asterisk,” was...

Casey Plett wrote the novel Little Fish, the short story collection A Safe Girl to Love, and co-edited the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers. She is a winner of the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the ALA Stonewall Book...