Alex Gonzalez, also known as OTISWOODS, was born & raised in the Westlake/MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he still resides to this day. 

His body of work explores a small window into how he perceives strength, the human will and industry. As a first generation American Latino born from Guatemalan immigrant parents, his experience is not unlike the millions that reside in the United States. OTISWOODS' work aims to bring awareness, recognition and acknowledgement to the immigrant struggle and bring life to the American Dream.

Anahi Bustillos was born in the bordertown of El Paso, Texas.  She moved to Los Angeles as soon as she gratuated highschool to get the hell out of Texas, find a place where she felt more at peace and (drum roll) to pursue her dreams of acting.  After nearly a decade of sitting in traffic, waitressing and becoming comfortable in her own skin she began booking on a regular basis and was a bonafide "working actress".  She has booked numerous roles on Primetime including: NCIS LA, NCIS, SWAT, Bosch, Little Fires Everywhere, Insecure, How to Get Away with Murder and over 30 National Commercials.  

In 2021, she went on an unplanned 6mth Odyssey in which she brokedown the framework of the life she had lovingly constructed through years of relentless hard work and crying an ocean of tears.  And at the ripe age of 39 she has decided to shut the door on acting to pursue the one thing her intuition has been firmly advising her to focus on for the last 20 years.  To sing the words and melodies that she has kept to private for no other reason then fear it self. "I dont want to pretend to be other people as a profession right now or ever again.  I feel my power lies in speaking my own words and sharing my own stories while giving myself the opportunity to fully express my creative well that has to be expressed. The music in this moment is to save my own life."

You can find her at home, in her 1930s kelly-green mohair chair, working through a new creative process while breathing through self-sabatoge in order to reach the level of unwavering selflove.  Her first record will be a Battle Cry.

Anahi would also like to add that every single human has a story worth hearing.  

Joel Jerome Morales has probably finished a new song in the time it took to read this sentence. Music is just in him all the time, and as someone with his own recording studio, he gets to make whatever sounds he hears in his own head whenever he wants. There’s no telling what might happen in the Psychedelic Thriftstore - the name of both Jerome’s recording studio and label - which is why the South Bay native and current NELA resident is a much-loved semi-legend, both for his own work and his work with such artists as LA Witch, La Sera, and Cherry Glazerr. Though he now releases music exclusively as Joel Jerome, he’s also got a 25-year discography of real bands, faux bands, self-released cassettes, instant solo albums, remakes of his own material and tributes to his favorite artists. It’s possible he finished a new album in the time it took to read this paragraph. 

Sandy Rodriguez is a Los Angeles-based artist and researcher. Her work investigates the methods and materials of painting across cultures and histories. Her Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is made up of a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. She was raised in San Diego, Tijuana, and Los Angeles. Rodriguez has exhibited at a number of museums and cultural institutions, including current exhibitions at Denver Art Museum, The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, The Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Recently she was awarded the Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency, Creative Capital Award and Migrations initiative from Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative and Global Cornell.

Ofelia Esparza is a Mexican-American altar maker, or Chicana altarista, whose work is informed by a deep spiritual belief in the traditional process, which pays homage and evokes memory of people, events, or places through multilevel structures embellished with photos, traditional foods, flowers, and handmade and found adornments. For nearly 40 years, Esparza has shared her knowledge and art about el Día de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) with people in schools, museums, community centers, prisons, and parks throughout the Los Angeles region and beyond.

Esparza was born in 1932 in East Los Angeles, where she has lived her whole life. The cultural practice of altar making in Chicano communities extends from devotional home altars for Catholic saints to the spiritual activities around el Día de los Muertos, which come from Mexico. Day of the Dead is an indigenous tradition that occurs on All Souls Day, where families build altars to remember ancestors and deceased loved ones. Mexican traditions such as altar making were shared within Esparza’s own family, specifically by her mother and great-grandmother, and she in turn passed them along to her own nine children, who continue to develop their own talents within the custom of altar making.

Karla Diaz was born in Los Angeles, CA. She received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2003 and a BA from California State University Los Angeles in 1999. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; LAXART, Hollywood, CA; Pitzer College, Claremont, CA; California State University Los Angeles, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI; the Serpentine Gallery, London, U.K.; and Museo Case de Cervantes, Madrid, Spain.

She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards from Art Matters, New York, NY; Tiffany Foundation, New York, NY; City of Los Angeles, CA; Riverside Art Museum, CA; and CalArts, Los Angeles, CA. Karla Diaz lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 

rafa esparza, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. esparza’s recent projects are grounded in laboring with land and adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist invites Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects, gathering people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces. 

Felix Quintana, received an MFA in Photography from San Jose State University, San Jose CA (2021) and a BA in Studio Art from Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA (2014). His solo exhibitions include SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA; Espacio 1839, Boyle Heights, CA; Avenue 50 Studio, Los Angeles, CA; and Residency Art, Inglewood, CA.

Quintana has served as an educator and teaching artist at UCLA VAPAE and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; ArtworxLA; Slanguage Studio, Wilmington, CA; Plaza de La Raza, Los Angeles, CA; Self Help Graphics & Art, Boyle Heights, CA; Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA. He has been an artist in residence at MACLA and Working Partnerships USA, San Jose, CA; and Meta Open Arts, Sunnyvale, CA. He currently lives, works, and teaches in Los Angeles, CA.

Betty Avila’s (she/her) work has centered on the intersection of the arts and social justice, with particular focus on community building, public space, and youth empowerment. She grew up in the Northeast Los Angeles neighborhood of Cypress Park and has held positions with the Getty Research Institute, The Music Center and the Levitt Pavilion. Betty joined Self Help Graphics’ leadership in 2015, an organization with a 48-year nationally-recognized artistic legacy of empowering the Chicana/o and Latinx communities of Los Angeles through the arts. She is the Chair of the Latinx Arts Alliance, and sits on the boards of Little Tokyo Service Center, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and was a founding board member of People for Mobility Justice. Betty is a passionate arts advocate, centering equity and justice, and she sat on the inaugural Advisory Committee for Los Angeles County's Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative as an appointee of Supervisor Hilda Solis. Betty has been invited to speak for the Ford Foundation, The Getty Foundation, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, California Association of Museums, Western Art Alliance and more. In 2017, Betty was named one of C-Suite Quarterly Magazine’s NextGen 10 in Philanthropy, Arts and Culture and an Impact-Maker to Watch by City Impact Labs. She received her B.A. in Literature at Pitzer College, has an M.A. in Arts Management from Claremont Graduate University, and is a 2008 Fulbright Fellow to Korea.

Tania Estrada is a stand up comedian, actress, and musician, born and raised in Los Angeles.   She is the daughter to Colombian parents that relocated to Los Angeles to escape the violence of the FARC, a guerrilla movement that terrorized Colombia in the 1960s.  Tania comes from a unique mix of races, her mother is Chinese-Colombian and her father is Black-Colombian. 

Estrada began to play instruments at the age of 12.  Inspired by musical comedian "Weird Al" Yankovic, the first instrument she learned was the accordion, followed by guitar.  

Tania’s natural demeanor and wit made her a great fit for radio, she was heard on KDUC 94.3FM on Lou Pizarro’s Repo Radio Show and has been on KLOS 95.5FM on the weekly Frazer Smith Show for 3 years.  She was also a guest host on “Quakes House" with Comedian Earthquake on Sirius XM’s Kevin Hart LOL Radio. 

Her flair for quick responses moved Tania into Red Carpet  and Hosting work, where she has brought her comedic banter to events, such as Lucha Vavoom, Seraph Films Red Carpet and the Sunset Film Festival. 

The comedy and radio circuit has helped push Tania into the acting realm in both English and Spanish. She can be seen movies and TV shows such as Operation Repo, Fugitivos De La Ley and Animal Kingdom (TNT).   She recently won the Best Independent Female Comedian Award at the 2019 HAPAwards (Hollywood African Prestigious Awards).