Stella Ahn was born in Los Angeles in1986 and is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles and more recently, Tijuana. She works through free-associative narrative and documentary which makes visible the things she finds meaningful. This work comprises of film, essays, and installations. She has exhibited her work in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Madrid, and Paris.
Ana Andrade has had solo shows at Centro cultural Quimera. Guadalajara, Jalisco. La galería de la esquina. Tijuana, Baja California, and La Selva Café. Guadalajara, Jalisco. Andrade uses photography and video to “register the interventions of man over nature, like the city itself: the urban. I highlight details that happen thanks through consumerism, damage to the environment, structures, changes and destructions that man develops in his habitat.” Ana Andrade lives and works in Tijuana.
Nelson Carlo De Los Santos was born in Santo Domingo in 1985. His film, She Said He Walks was awarded a BAFTA for best experimental short film in 2009. Presently, he has received his MFA in Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts. During this period, he made his first feature, an experimental documentary shot in NYC which has shown in festivals in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, including Tropical Uncanny at the Guggenheim, New York. In 2013, his first fictional feature, COCOTE was awarded the prestigious Fundación Carolina script writing residency in Madrid. This project also won the Ibermedia Development Fund, the Dominican Cinema Institute Production Fund, The Ibermedia Production Fund and the World Cinema Fund of Berlinale. He’s just finished an experimental fiction essay inspired in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666.
Clay Gibson. Drawing on continuities between social and solitary spheres, Gibson’s work combines both fabricated and found objects cited from domestic or public spaces. Each object distinguishing subtle material estrangements from that of the everyday, postponing the object’s regular function. Through their intervention, the objects suggest that some activity has been delayed or some action already occurred; an actor has been displaced and responsibility vicariously redirected. Clay Gibson received his BFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts and currently lives and works in Mexico City.
Marco Ramirez ERRE was born in Tijuana, Baja California. ERRE received his Law Degree at Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. He than immigrated to the United States where he worked for 17 years in the construction industry as a carpenter.
In 1989, he became active in the field of visual arts, since then he has participated in residencies, lectures and different individual and collective exhibitions in countries like Mexico, USA, Russia, China, Puerto Rico, Germany, France, Spain, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and in mayor exhibitions like InSite ’94, InSite ’97, the VI and VII Havana Biennials, the Whitney Biennial 2000, The San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, Made in California, México Illuminated, From Baja to Vancouver, Política de la Diferencia, Arte Iberoamericano de fin de siglo, Human/Nature, The 2007 Sao Paulo/Valencia Biennial, the California Biennial 08, and the second Moscow Biennial, among others. In 2007, he received a USA artist fellowship, and is currently developing a program for Estación Tijuana an independent, non-profit alternative space at the San Diego-Tijuana border with a focus in art, architecture, urbanism and popular culture.
Jack Heard (New York, 1987) is currently attending the Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon, Portugal. In June Heard will join Michael Krebber’s class at Staedelschule in Frankfurt Am Main. Heard has exhibited internationally in Norway, Mexico, Iceland, Britain, and Brazil. Heard was also a prominent member of Kchung Radio in Los Angeles for the first year and a half of its existence.
Louis Hock’s artwork - films, video tapes, and media installations - have been exhibited in solo shows at numerous national and international art institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1986 Hock completed a four part, four-hour video about the life and times of a community of undocumented Mexican workers in southern California, THE MEXICAN TAPES: A Chronicle of Life Outside the Law. The series was broadcast internationally on the PBS in the U.S., BBC in the U.K., and Televisa in Latin America. THE AMERICAN TAPES:Tales of Immigration, a follow up to that series, was released in 2013, premiered at the Morelia Film Festival, and was screened in 2014 at Ambulante, El Ojo Cojo, Cinefest, and other festivals. In 1997 Hock also completed a feature-length film, LA MERA FRONTERA. The documentary work, twisted with fiction, offers a contemporary portrait of Nogales, Arizona and Sonora through the lens of the 1918 border battle between the U.S. and Mexico.
NEWSPAPER READING CLUB’S Fiona Connor was born in 1981 in Auckland, New Zealand and lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include Wallworks at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne (2014); Can Do Academy at Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland (2014); Bare Use at 1301PE, Los Angeles (2013); Untitled (Mural Design) at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin (2012); Mount Gabriel, Ruby and Ash at Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland (2012); and Murals and Print, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2012). Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions including: The 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); Prospect: New Zealand Art Now at City Gallery, Wellington (2011); De-Building at Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch (2011);On Forgery: is one thing better than another? at LAXART, Los Angeles (2011); and NEW10 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne (2010). Connor completed her MFA at California Institute of the Arts. Connor is a 2011 recipient of the Chartwell Trust Award for Patronage and a 2010 finalist for the Walters Prize.
NEWSPAPER READING CLUB’S Michala Paludan was born in 1983 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Recent exhibitions include: The Moderna Exhibition 2014: Society Acts at Moderna Museet, Malmö (2014); 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); Lanx Satura at Henningsen Gallery, Copenhagen (2013); Arbeidstid at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2013); Murmurial at Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne (2013); The Hollow Center at Smack Mellon, New York (2013); Cloud Hosting at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2013); and The Distance Plan at Favorite Goods, Los Angeles (2012). Paludan is a fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program and received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Paludan studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 2005 to 2009. Paludan lives and works in Copenhagen.
Mariah Garnett mixes documentary, narrative and experimental filmmaking practices to make work that accesses existing people and communities beyond her immediate experience. Using source material that ranges from found text to iconic gay porn stars, Garnett often inserts herself into the films, creating cinematic allegories that codify and locate identity. Garnett holds an MFA from CalArts in Film/Video and a BA from Brown University in American Civilization. Garnett’s work has been screened internationally including the following venues: REDCAT, White Columns, SF MoMA, Venice Biennial (Swiss Offsite Pavillion), Rencontres Internationales (Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Beirut), Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Hamburg). In 2014 she was in residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, and Made in LA, the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition. The LA Times called her piece “Best in Show.” 2012 she took part in a 2 person show Common Era at ltd Los Angeles. In 2011 Garnett had a solo show at Human Resources Gallery in Los Angeles titled Encounters I May or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña: resides in San Francisco where he is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. Born and raised in Mexico City, he came to the US in 1978 to study Post-Studio art at Cal Arts. His pioneering work in performance, video, installation, poetry, journalism, photography, cultural theory and radical pedagogy, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, the politics of the body, “extreme culture” and new technologies. A MacArthur Fellow and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to National Public Ratio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). He is an active member of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. For twenty-five years, Gómez-Peña has contributed to the cultural debates of our times staging legendary performance part pieces such as, “Border Brujo” (1998), “The Couple in the Cage” (1992), “The Crucifiction Project” (1994), “Temple of Confessions” (1995), “The Mexterminator Project” (1994), The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities (1999-2002) and the Mapa/Corpo series (2004-2007).
Carlos Matsuo was born in Tijuana, Baja California in 1988. Matsuo studied communication in the University of Baja California. He directed the feature Basura, included in the Guadalajara International Film Festival (2014) and created the web series La Utopia de la antigua California as well as Onda Temporal. Recently he won the FONCA scholarship to direct the documentary The Technology of Tears.
Temra Pavlovic (b. Utrecht, the Netherlands) is an artist working with video. Her work has been shown in different contexts, a selection of which includes the RedCat theater in Los Angeles, Otras Obras in Tijuana and Les Rencontres Internationales in Paris, gallery Lodos in Mexico City, and PeregineProgram in Chicago. She is also a member of Oa4s, a 3-headed poetry group from Mexico City. Temra holds a BFA from CalArts and is currently based in Amsterdam.
Michael Ray-Von (b. 1988) is a Mexico City-based artist whose work uses materials drawn from primary education to depict scenarios of autonomy, mechanisms of power, and consider the epistemology of the sociopolitical body. In 2012 Ray-Von co-founded Otras Obras, an art space in Tijuana, MX. He was co-director and curator there until moving to Mexico City in 2013 to work with poetry group Oa4s (On all fours). He holds a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts.
Daniel Rosas is a native of Mexicali, a city in the border state of Baja California. Committed to filmmaking from an early age, Rosas studied photography and film direction in Madrid, Spain, and film and television production in San Diego, CA. Rosas has done commercial photography in Mexico, as well as experimental audio-visual installations and music videos for myriad bands of the underground scene of the U.S. – Mexico border. In Rosa’s newer project, “Living like a dog.”
Francesca Sloane was born in New York City in 1987 and was raised in Philadelphia. Sloane received her BFA in Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts. Her work has shown in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Tijuana and Tel Aviv. Francesca has written one book of poetry and makes videos for theindependent house label LA Club Resource. Sloane is currently finishing up a film she shot in El Salvador: It’s about water. She shoots mostly on tape.
Luisa Martínez es organizadora social nativa de Tijuana y residente de Los Ángeles. Estudió Sociología y Estudios Latinoamericanos en la Universidad de California, Berkeley. Actualmente cursa una maestría de Arquitectura en SCI-Arc. Es uno de los organizadores originales de las fiestas Ruidosón en Tijuana. Ha trabajado con grupos en la Ciudad de México, Tijuana y Los Ángeles.
Reuben Torres es organizador social, músico, y escritor, nativo de San Diego y residente fronterizo. Estudió Teoría del Cine en la Universidad de California, Berkeley. Actualmente forma parte de la banda Tijuanense, Los Macuanos, pioneros del movimiento local conocido como Ruidosón. Su obra escrita se ha difundido en varios medios especializados, entre ellos Vice, Remezcla, y MTV Iggy.
