Artist Biographies:
Dorothy Cheung (she/her) is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Hong Kong. Her practice explores the notion of identities and home through dual perspectives: the personal and the political, memory and forgetfulness. Her moving-image works have been exhibited internationally at Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art), EYE Filmmuseum, and Korzo Theater, and selected for film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Leeds International Film Festival, Seoul Women’s Film Festival, South Taiwan Film Festival and Queer Lisboa.
Hiura Fernandes (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural producer, and product designer living in João Pessoa, Brazil. Her audiovisual and performance work seeks to unite the body with cinematographic practices. Her work considers original forms of communication through the body and ancestrality as pathways to healing and embodied living. As a Black travesti, she experiences in her body and in her art the stereotypes of counter-hegemonic experiences. She seeks to understand the expressions of the body as a power capable of generating love, fear, anguish, and hate.
Beau Gomez (he/him) is a visual artist based in Montréal and Toronto whose practice is informed by ideas, challenges and conversations around cross-cultural narratives, as they relate to positions of queerness and community. His work is grounded in image-making as a conduit between individual and collective experience, giving permission to shared means of learning, nurturing, and renewal. He has exhibited projects and engaged in discourse surrounding image arts and community-building practices in various establishments, including VU Photo, Artspace Gallery, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Reel Asian, Toronto International Film Festival, and Critical Distance Centre for Curators.
Dolissa Medina (she/her) and Ananias P. Soria (he/him) are the current incarnation of Grito Viejito, an artist collective devoted to queer world-mending through the adaptation of the Mexican folkloric “Danza de los Viejitos” (Dance of the Old Men). Medina, a filmmaker, writer, and organizer from the borderlands of South Texas, founded the research-creation project, which uses the Viejito figure as a vessel to hold dialogues around health, HIV histories, and queer futures. In the project’s first iteration, Medina partners with Soria, a multidisciplinary artist interested in transformative energetic expression through movement, music, and dance.
Lili Nascimento (they/them) is a transpersonal psychologist, columnist, and artist who studies and works with children living with HIV and AIDS in Brazil. They work at the intersection of art and the clinic, provoking poetic and political possibilities for existence.
Kurt Weston (he/him) is an artist working primarily with photography. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1991 and became legally blind in 1996 due to a related condition, Cytomegalovirus retinitis. For a time he was easily identified as having AIDS due to purplish red lesions—Kaposi’s sarcoma—all over his face and body. His artwork reflects on this experience of visibility and disability, examining cultural stigmas surrounding HIV and AIDS, the disabled body, mortality, and loss. Weston’s photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the National AIDS Museum and have been featured in exhibitions at the Kennedy Center for the Arts (Washington, DC), the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, CA), and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Ana, CA), among others.
