Frisly Soberanis (b. 1993) is a director and video artist, from Queens, New York via Guatemala. His work explores separation, distance and the migrant experience. He has received support from E4FC’s Fuse fund, Tribeca Film Institute’s New Media Prototype Fund, Culturestrike and the Nelson Mandela Foundation. He is one of the 2019 Open Society’s Photo Documentary Fellows.
Génesis Mancheren Abaj (b. 1992) is an enby, queer Kaqchikel kuqunel/actor, tz’ibanel/writer and filmmaker from B’oko’ Guatemala and Queens, New York. They refuse to limit their creativity, may it be acting, writing, drawing or knitting. Regardless of medium, they are always exploring their Kaqchikel culture, past and present, as well as pushing the boundaries of what a Kaqchikel future could look/feel like outside of our capitalistic/imperialistic reality. Their film work and writing has been exhibited at Open Society Foundation, Museum of the City of New York, Tribeca Film Festival, Icaro Film Festival, Barnard College and NYU. Génesis is currently applying to evening acting conservatories in hopes to start Fall 2021. IG: @_gmabaj
Leslie A. Martinez is a designer, researcher, and innovator currently based in Los Angeles. Leslie was a 2016 Processing Foundation fellow alongside Digital Citizens Lab, 2017 TED Conferences resident and has led innovative collaborative spaces like Hack the Ban. In 2017 Leslie served as Program Manager for the Ecologies of Migrant Care Initiative at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics where she assisted the production of several interviews for the archive. Between 2012 and 2014 she was communications manager at Ciudad de la Imaginación, an arts organization based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Daughter of Guatemalan migrants, she identifies as a Guate-Nuyorker.
Kenia R. Guillen (b. 1994, El Salvador) is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her cinematic practice is in conversation with the wounds of migration; creating with the intention to find processes of healing communally. Inspired by myths and legends, she’s interested in the power of personal memory as an archive, how to write rural life and peoples into cinematic memory, and how to honor the mystical and supernatural as reality. Her work has been exhibited in spaces such as Open Society Foundations, Galería de La Raza, El Museo de Los Sures, Tragame Luz Festival, and Icaro Film Festival. IG: @guillenken
Maryam Ivette Parhizkar was born and raised by a Salvadoran and Iranian family in southwest Houston, Texas. Her chapbooks include Somewhere Else the Sun is Falling into Someone's Eyes (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2019), As for the future (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016), and Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014). She is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University, where she thinks through aesthetics, poetics, history, and possession/possessiveness through a relational approach to ethnic studies. A CantoMundo fellow, she lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, on the periphery of the Hackensack Meadowlands. Twitter: @MIParhizkar
Òscar Moisés Díaz (b.1993) is a queer genderfluid Salvadoran poet-astrologer, essayist, playwright, film curator, and artist. They've exhibited art in places such as the X Central American Biennial, several museums including the Queens Museum, and a solo at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Costa Rica. They are based in Queens, NY where they are working on their first book of collected poems and essays. Their new forthcoming play is called GENERACION MARUCHAN which is about grungers in San Salvador during the 1990s. They also run a tertulia under the name The Order of the Rosebush where Central Americans meet up to discuss 20th Century Central American poetry through the lens of Astrology. @oscar.moises.diaz