Ellen Sebastian Chang is a director and writer. Through her art practices, she advocates for human rights as in her Creative Capital project, House/Full that documents sex trafficking in Oakland. Sebastian Chang was co-founder and artistic director of LIFE ON THE WATER, a national and internationally known presenting and producing organization at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center from 1986 through 1995. In 2015 she collaborated with  artist Maya Gurantz to create A Hole in Space (Oakland Redux), an underground public art project. Her 1982 directorial/ writing debut Your Place Is No Longer With Us created in a Victorian mansion, served to the audience a meal of black-eyed peas, mustard greens and cornbread at the performance’s end.  Amid work on her artistic practice, she owned and operated FuseBOX Restaurant in West Oakland until 2017 when the restaurant closed.

Amara Tabor-Smith describes her work as Afro futurist Conjure Art. Her creative process as a dance maker is rooted in collaboration, spiritual ritual, and questions of identity and belonging. Her movement vocabulary is inspired by improvisation, Butoh and African Diaspora dance traditions, specifically drawing from movements of the Orishas found in Afro Cuban and Afro Brazilian folkloric dance. In 2006—with the goal of inspiring dialogue—she founded Deep Waters Dance Theater, a company that focuses on social- and environmental-justice issues, race, gender, cultural identity and spirituality. In 2009, she co-founded Headmistress with Sherwood Chen, creating intimate movement histories with enduring questions around ancestral, national and transcultural connections. The work of DWDT and Headmistress has been presented in venues throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, nationally and internationally. She has worked with artists such as Ed Mock, Joanna Haigood, Anna Deveare Smith, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Faustin Linyekula, Liz Lerman, Adia Tamar Whitaker and Ronald K. Brown, as well as with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar as a former associate artistic director and dancer with Urban Bush Women for 10 years.