About

Gitanjali Kolanad was involved in the practice, performance, and teaching of bharata natyam for close to forty years, performing in major cities in Europe, America and India. Gitanjali's short story collection Sleeping with Movie Stars was published by Penguin India and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. Her first novel, Girl Made of Gold, set in Tanjore in the 1920s was short-listed for Tata Live Novel of the Year, 2020. She has written numerous articles on aspects of Indian dance for well-known Indian publications. She was the 2016 Singapore International Writer in Residence with NUS University Scholars Program and The Arts House. IMPACT, the organization she co-founded, teaches and promotes Indian martial art forms in Toronto. She was a professor at Shiv Nadar University, developing their performing arts program. Currently, she is working on her second novel, set within the world of early Tamil cinema.

Website: https://gitanjalikolanad.mystrikingly.com

Fleur Coevoet is an intuitive photographer, writer and visual artist. She creates worlds where black and white form the foundation of an infinite source of fantasy. Inspired by mythology, symbolism, iconography, fashion photography, Japanese culture, cosplay, rituals and a Jungian darkness, her works bring out a raw energy. Her inspiring, self-contained characters are the result of contemplation, research and spontaneous hunches. Characteristic are the mythical names that are chosen for each exhibition as if they were power words themselves. Where ‘Sacristia’ and ‘Vanitas’ were situated more in the atmosphere of mortality, she broadened her view and came up with ‘Theia’ in 2021. ‘Propheteia’, ‘Maegi’ and her latest series ‘Aeneis’ focus on the characters and the atmosphere they exude.

Website: www.fleurcoevoet.com

Facebook: @fleurcoevoetphotography

Karen Lethlean is a retired English teacher, from Perth Western Australia. Whose family has links through the wheatbelt off a farm near Narembeen and possible Noongar connections. During military service as a Rat of Tobruk he father was often called the Afghan due his dark features. With fiction Barbaric Yawp, Ken*Again, Pendulum Papers. She has won a few awards through Australian and UK competitions. Including Best of Times, with Bum Joke, Froth and Bubble literary festival with, Long Haired Weirdo and Wild Words with a piece titled Red, Yellow and Black. Almond Tree received a commendation from Lorian Hemingway Short Fiction. Later published by Paper Trains Journal under the title of He was a She. Karen is currently working on a memoir of military service from 1972-76 titled Army Girl. In her other life Karen is a triathlete who has done Hawaii Ironman championships twice.

Laura Cantor is an artist living in the Bronx, New York City, urban images are central to her work. She is a printmaker, painter and mixed media artist with a degree in visual art from Empire SUNY (2005) and an MFA with a concentration in printmaking from Lehman College CUNY, 2010. In 2006 she had a solo show at the N.Y.C. Transit Museum and at the Manhattan campus of Empire College. She had work purchased by Montefiore Hospital and work in the collections of the N.Y.C. Transit Museum, Lehman College, Empire College and St. Louis University. Laura worked with 2 non profit art groups in the Bronx, Bronx Printmakers and Studio 889.

Instagram: @lcbxartist

Facebook: @laura.cantor1

Kathryn Sadakierski is a 22-year-old freelance writer from Massachusetts whose poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in hundreds of anthologies, magazines, and literary journals around the world, including Blue Marble Review, Capsule Stories, Critical Read, Dime Show Review, DoveTales, Ekstasis Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, Literature Today, New Jersey English Journal, NewPages Blog, Northern New England Review, October Hill Magazine, Origami Poems Project, Prospectus: A Literary Offering Blog, seashores: an international journal to share the spirit of haiku, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions (Pandemic Evolution anthology, 2021), Silver Stork Magazine, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, Songs of Eretz, Spillwords, Teachers of Vision, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, The Bangor Literary Journal, The BeZine, The Scriblerus, The Voices Project, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Toyon Literary Magazine, Yellow Arrow Journal, and elsewhere. In 2020, she was awarded the C. Warren Hollister Non-Fiction Prize. Her micro-chapbook "Travels through New York" was published by Origami Poems Project (2020). She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. and M.S. from Bay Path University. In 2019, she attended the Newport Symposium, having been selected as a Scholar. Additional information about Kathryn and her publication credits may be located at her Poets & Writers Directory page.

Graduating in 2018 with his BFA from the University of the Fraser Valley and currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Calgary, Jesse Klassen explores themes around spiritual and religious identity in the 21st century. Jesse’s education has been aimed towards constructing a culturally diverse foundation thus far taking him across Europe, into China, and even down to Guatemala. Jesse is an emerging artist and over the past 5 years has participated in numerous exhibitions with works appearing in countries such as Canada, the United States, the UK, and Poland. Working in a wide array of visual media including painting, sculpture, and performance Jesse approaches art making through ritualistic production. His works bring into service abstraction, surrealism, symbiology, and theology to engage in visual storytelling and spiritual exploration. These works are realized across a diverse range of styles and techniques suggesting a connection to the multiple influences found during his global studies. Through his creative synthesis Jesse aims to explore the connections between art and contemporary faith identities ultimately disseminating new knowledge concerning the use of artistic production as a method of theological enquiry.

Instagram: @j.klassen.artspot

Linda J. Armstrong, a writer, photographer, and contemporary painter, lives with her husband of many decades among the spectacular red rock canyons of western Colorado. After retiring from teaching, she had a second career writing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for the educational market. She is currently concentrating on contemporary poetry and acrylic abstracts on canvas.

Website: www.lindajarmstrong.com

Instagram: @thisbluerabbit

Facebook: @larmst

Twitter: @lindajarmstron

Rikardo Druškić was born in 1990 in Zagreb and has spent all his adult life living in Sarajevo. His interest in art began during high school with a main focus on illustration and digital art. Rikardo uses a combination of art techniques such as painting, street art, drawing and digital art. His works have been exhibited, both independently and in collective exhibitions in many art galleries and public spaces around the world such as: Sarajevo, Mostar, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Dubai, Taiwan, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna. He was one of the finalists in the Art Revolution Competition Taipei in 2014 and the same year his works, “Madness Continuous and Depth” were selected by visual art platform to be presented at Times Square in New York. His first solo exhibition, “Tales of Love” took place at the Gallery Boris Smoje in 2014 in Sarajevo. Later that year the same exhibition was presented in Memorial Home of Svetozar Corovic in Mostar. One of his most significant professional exhibitions were: “Initiation”, Collegium Artisticum – Sarajevo, Gallery 25N – New York, “The Wall” – Historical Museum in Sarajevo, Post-election Trauma – Sarajevo, “Where is the Exit” – Gallery JAVA in Sarajevo, “Diggin”, Maineouevre – Berlin. He was a participant at Festival of Street Art (FUU) in Sarajevo, during which his creative work was transmitted into public space. In 2016 he was invited to paint a mural inside the Sarajevo Youth Theater expanding his field of interest into the world of public art. In 2019 he painted a mural in Brussels and in 2020 started a residential program in Almuñécar, Spain. In February, Rikardo painted a replica of an airplane from WW2, which is exhibited at the Historical Museum of BiH in Sarajevo. For the birthday of his hometown, Sarajevo, Rikardo organized an exhibition “Was is Walter“, where the WW2 airplane replica was shown to the public. During the start of the Covid-19 Pandemic, Rikardo made his first video exhibition, which he collected donations for Pomozi.ba, a charity organization. Rikardo is currently working on a project entitled “Awakening Solidarity“, in which he paints 5 murals in 5 different cities in Bosnia and in Herzegovina.

Website: www.rikardodruskic.com

Instagram: @rikardodruskic_art

Marie C. Lecrivain is a poet, publisher, and ordained priestess in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the ecclesiastical arm of Ordo Templi Orientis. Her work has been published in California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Gargoyle, Nonbinary Review, Orbis, Pirene's Fountain, and many other journals. She's the author of several books of poetry and fiction, and recent editor of Ashes to Stardust: A David Bowie Tribute Anthology (forthcoming/copyright 2022 Sybaritic Press, www.sybpress.com).

Website: https://dashboardhorus.blogspot.com

Facebook: @marieclecrivainauthor

Mary M. Mazziotti is a self-taught visual artist working primarily in hand-embroidery on textiles with a special interest in contemporary memento mori. Her exhibition history begins in 2006 at the Rundetaarne Exhibit Hall in Copenhagen and I’ve exhibited internationally in galleries and museums including The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Mattress Factory, NordArt in Germany and the Emily Harvey Gallery in Venice. I’ve been selected for residencies in Venice, Spain, France, and Australia as well as throughout the United States. She exhibited at the O. K. Harris Gallery in NYC and am currently represented by BE Galleries in Pittsburgh.

Website: www.mazziottiart.com

Marina Burana is a writer and a painter from Argentina based in Taiwan. She is also a puppeteer, a barkcloth maker and a facilitator of participatory community art projects. As a writer, Marina mainly focuses on writing fiction in English and in Spanish. She has published three books of short stories and her poems, works of fiction and nonfiction appear in various anthologies, journals and magazines. Her plays have had stage readings and full productions in the US, UK, Argentina, Uruguay, Canada, Peru, Portugal and Taiwan.

Website: www.marinaburana.com

Instagram: @burana_studio

Cai Quirk is a trans and genderqueer photographer who focuses on the intersection of gender diversity throughout history, its erasure, and contemporary reclamation and re-story-ation. Their self-portrait series and upcoming book, ‘Transcendence,’ engages with connections between gender, mythology, and nature-based spirituality. Recent talks include ‘Myths of Gender,’ ‘The Power of Restoryation,’ and ‘Gender Diversity and Spirituality,’ given in conferences across America. In the spring of 2022 Cai received the Minnie Jane Scholarship and a four-month artist residency from the Pendle Hill Quaker Retreat Center. Recent exhibitions include Queering the Cream City (Alice Wilds Gallery), The New Now 2021 Washington (Forsberg Art Gallery), and Print + (Hunterdon Art Museum). They received bachelor’s degrees in music and photography from Indiana University.

Website: https://caiquirk.com/

Instagram: @caiquirk