Anna Aguiar Kosicki

Anna Aguiar Kosicki lives and works in Chicago. They write and edit essays, stage manage plays, fight for abortion access, and have too many hobbies.

Serena Arora

Serena Arora is a dynamic New York City–based actor, playwright, singer, and writer fiercely dedicated to spotlighting underrepresented voices. A Boston University grad with a B.A. in English and Theater Arts minor, she’s rocked stages in Once Upon a Carnival and Macbeth. Her debut EP, Painted Blind, and poetry novel, The Beast Within, reveal her bold creative range. Formerly a versatile creative writing instructor at GrubStreet, Serena’s work has appeared in Woman Who Win Magazine, BU’s Her Campus, and The Connector. Fluent in Hindi and proficient in Italian, she crafts narratives that challenge and inspire.

Artel Great

Artel Great is an Independent Spirit Award-nominated filmmaker, writer, and cultural critic whose insightful contributions bridge the gap between Black visual culture, performance, and freedom practices. He holds the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in African American Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University, and his writing has appeared in The New Republic and across national media. He is the author of The Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance (Rutgers University Press), which has garnered critical and commercial acclaim.

Branden Janese

Branden Janese is a writer, facilitator, and curator based in New York City. Branden's writing has been awarded grants, residencies, and fellowships from NYSCA, NYFA, NYC Mayor’s Office, and more. She's been published in The Wall Street Journal, Complex, Interview, Flaunt, LADYGUNN and elsewhere. Her podcast “Sick Empire ('21)” reached #46 on Apple’s ‘Top 100.’ She curates and hosts literary social events under the name Reparative Reading. 

Timiki Salinas

Timiki Salinas is a theatre/film artist deeply interested in physical storytelling. He is a company member of The American Mime Theatre and a co-founder of The Bellwether Project, an anti-hierarchical arts collective that creates work using the principles of radical nuance and radical joy. Credits include: Becky Nurse of Salem (Lincoln Center), Dr. Rees Ziti’s Pageant For A Better Future (Ars Nova ANT Fest, Vineyard Arts Project),“Emilia Suárez: Timing”, (in)alienable, “Search Party”. Education: Carnegie Mellon University, Moscow Art Theatre. 

Ankita Sharma

Ankita Sharma is a Brooklyn-based experimental movement artist invested in storytelling where content dictates genre and betrays expectation. They create to think critically, unpacking systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in body and mind. In aesthetic, their work is grungy, confrontational, and cheeky, rooted in Dance-Theater and forms from the South Asian and African diasporas.

Julia Wojciechowska

Julia Wojciechowska is a Polish-born and raised theatre practitioner with a background in set and costume production. She holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her research lies at the intersection of performance, labor, and material culture, with particular attention to the politics of visibility and the poetics of craft. Drawing from a professional background in international stage work, she explores how embodied labor informs performative environments and backstage economies. She’s honored to be a part of this year’s cohort and engage in practices in performance analysis and critical writing. 

Isaac Woon

Isaac Woon is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. His debut play, Pointless, was a winner of the 2024 New South Young Playwrights festival in Atlanta, Georgia, and was developed through a reading at Godspeed Studios. He's interested in dark, irreverent comedy with a confessional edge and is currently seeking his degree through CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies, focused in Scriptwriting and Performance.

Yashmita

Yashmita (she/her) is a filmmaker, writer, and critic who tells stories about queer South Asian life, community, and belonging. She’s currently earning her M.A. in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, where she explores how film, history, and archives shape the way we see ourselves. She has worked in film festival programming, arts accessibility, and community storytelling, always with a focus on uplifting underrepresented voices.

Melvin Ningyao Yen

Melvin Ningyao Yen (all pronouns) is a New York–based Taiwanese theatre producer, director, playwright, and cultural critic. Growing up in a Buddhist family, their work often weaves the philosophy of impermanence into performance. Their artistic practice bridges theatre, photography, and academic writing, with recent research on Embodied Semiosis in Global Physical Theatre. Melvin has held fellowships at Playwrights Horizons and Manhattan Theatre Club, and their works include the musical Awake and plays such as The Flight of Impermanence, Breakfast, and Waning Moon. They publish theatre criticism, poetry, and essays on their Substack, The Ritual of Seeing. Instagram: @melvindoesntknow

Hope Yoon

Hope Yoon is a writer and translator from Seoul working across fiction, theater, and video games. Her preoccupations include distance and departure, technocriticism, and lay understandings of physics. Her fiction has appeared in Columbia Journal, her poetry translations are forthcoming in And So On (Workroom Press, 2025), and she is a member of Soho Rep’s writer/director lab (2024-2025). Upcoming teaching engagements include the Strother School of Radical Attention and Tiny Spoon Magazine, where she will lead workshops on video games and narrative agency. BA: Comparative Literature, Stanford University.

Rohan Zhou-Lee

Rohan Zhou-Lee is an international arts organizer. In 2023, they became the first Black Asian Open City Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Bylines include Newsweek, Hyperallergic, and more. Zhou-Lee founded The Blasian March, a Black-Asian-Blasian solidarity organization through arts and education. It received a certificate from Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Zhou-Lee has spoken at Harvard University, New York University, The University of Tokyo, and more. Performances: poetry, the 2022 Unite Festival (Zürich, Switzerland,); dance, the Over Here! Off-Broadway revival; and trumpet, Soundcake Orchestra at Lincoln Center. Pronouns: They | Siya | 祂 (tā) | Elle. Gender: Firebird. www.diaryofafirebird.com