Jill Freidberg is a documentary filmmaker, oral historian, radio producer, and youth media educator. Her work reflects her belief that responsible, powerful storytelling builds understanding and solidarity across borders and across the street.
Inye Wokoma is a multi-disciplinary artist, journalist, and executive co-director of Wa Na Wari, a Seattle-based Black arts organization. His creative practice explores personal narratives through the lens of politics, economics, and collective histories. For the past fifteen years he has explored the displacement of the Black community from Seattle's Central District, where he was born and raised. This creative arc has manifested as a series of works in solo and group shows in museums, galleries, and site-specific community installations. In 2019 he extended his practice to include the co-founding of Wa Na Wari, a social practice art project that transformed a Black-owned home into a center for Black art and community building.
Over the past 15 years Inye has explored his own family stories through a socio-political lens. His contribution to the Shelf Life book invited him to reverse that process. The stories in this volume inspired him to create series of photographic collages that merge imagery of social and political events with Pacific Northwest landscapes to present a more meditative reflection on Black life in Seattle.
Inye received his B.A. degree in journalism and filmmaking from Clark Atlanta University. He received a 2002 Editorial Photography Award and a 2006 Photo Essay Award from the Society of Professional Journalists Western Washington, a 2004 National Council on Crime and Delinquency PASS Award for criminal justice reportage, a 2012 Telly Award for his film "Lost and (Puget) Sound," a 2019 Americans For the Arts Public Art Year In Review Award as a part of the groups show "Borderlands" and a 2019 Neddy Award Winner in the Open Medium category.
Bonnie Hopper was born and raised in Seattle and is one of thirteen children. In 1987 she applied to and was accepted into the advertising art program at Seattle Community College where she studied art for two years. Although art has always played an important role in Bonnie's life, she did not pursue her dream of becoming a professional artist until 2008 when she was commissioned to do a portrait by a friend of the family. In 2016 Bonnie began her association with Onyx Fine Arts Collective in Seattle, taking part in the "Truth B Told" exhibition for artists of African descent at the King Street Station and was a selected as a finalist in Gallery 110's Emerging Artist Program exhibition.
Erin Shigaki is a fourth-generation Japanese American. She creates art that is community-based and often grounded in the World War II incarceration of her people. She is passionate about highlighting similarities between that history and systemic injustices communities of color continue to face. Erin's activism includes work on the annual Minidoka Pilgrimage to the American concentration camp where her family was incarcerated and with Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, abolitionist project of social justice advocates.
She is the recipient of grants and commissions from ArtsWA, the Wing Luke Museum, Densho, 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, National Academy of Design, and the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, among others. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and believes that wielding art and activism can educate, redress, and incrementally heal.
Chi Moscou-Jackson of Seattle studied at Ontario College of Art & Design University. He practices mixed media art and installation art and focuses on social, political, and ecological themes. He uses collage to mix elements of photography printmaking, sculpture, drawing etc.
