Community Profile: Voices From The Real World

From the vault - Recorded nearly a year ago, Community Profile member (and 2024 gala performer) Jane Mantiri describes her father’s determination to bring his family to the United States, the dreams she put on hold until his passing, and her plans to return to her birth country of Indonesia to film a documentary about her story - a trip she just returned from!

 Mare Biddle is a playwright, author, and member of the DGA. Flash Nonfiction publications include “Hair Ties” at The Manifest-station and “Tuesday Morning” in Under the Gum Tree. Her One-Act companion plays “Throwing Snowballs at the Moon” and “Post Game Show” were produced at Arizona’s Theatre Artists Studio. Other dramatic and literary works have appeared in various productions, festivals, and readings. She’s done some good writing and some bad writing, to good reviewsand bad reviews, in perplexing combinations. Mostly she just keeps practicing in Portland, Oregon.

Indigenous 2 Spirit artist a.c.ramírez de arellaño (Taíno Hiwayawa) utilizes public spaces to create a dialogue that educates, inspires, and builds bridges between communities. The artist seeks to draw attention to the capacity for individuals and communities to heal, grow, and thrive through our interconnectedness. Like many Indigenous peoples who push back against erasure and are writing themselves and their Tribal Nations back into history through their art, a.c.ramírez takes inspiration from ancestral stories to create large pieces of art. Working with leather, oil on canvass, and mask making, their work tells a story of overcoming barriers, and the impact of colonialism at the intersection of their disabled, Indigenous, and queer communities. A recipient of the GLAPN Queer Heroes Award, they have been interviewed on OPB, NPR, and numerous other local broadcasts. They have worked artistically with a number of city offices, school districts, non profits, , and currently are participating in a 2021 artist-in-residency program with Ten Tiny Talks. Their work has been added to Regional Arts & Culture Council’s collection of public art for the City of Portland, Oregon.

Darlene Zimbardi is an author and performer. Her illness memoir, “If Only George Clooney Were My Doctor,” is an off-beat take about her time on life support.Her writing about illness advocacy has been performed as staged readings in New York City and her writing on caregiving has been featured in ensemble theater pieces at the George Street Playhouse in New Jersey, and a community reading at the Profile Theater in Portland. Darlene considers herself part of the Narrative Medicine Movement. 

“Jessica Rich is a seasoned veteran of Community Profile, having found herself, time and again, through her own unique intersectionality, identifying as a member of three of our different cohorts. As a mom, a musician and a writer, Jess has been a creative in all of her life, and the poetry she shares here is only one (potent) sliver of that creativity.”

Jessica Rich is a writer and student in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been featured in journals and anthologies here and there, most recently in The Gravity of the Thing  and Existere Literary Journal. Rich has performed her work across the country, in bookstores, bars, laundromats and on buses. She is currently studying concurrent degrees in Psychology and Creative Writing with a focus on Nonfiction at Portland State University. Her proudest work, though, is the creative workshops she’s coordinated over the years, currently with a local mental health organization. She lives in typical Portland fashion, in a basement apartment with two cats in her cave and a Treasure Troll upstairs.