Amy Leona Havin is a poet, choreographer, and director originally from Rehovot, Israel. She is the Language Arts columnist for Oregon ArtsWatch and is based in Portland, Oregon, San Diego, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel. Havin’s work is inspired by the coastal deserts of her childhood and constant travels through the canyons and prairies of the American West. With process rooted in the duality of her heritage, she weaves together a collectively introspective body of work, honoring the natural world. www.amyleonahavin.com

Rebecca Clarren has been reporting on the denizens and landscapes of the American West for more than twenty years. Her journalism, which is frequently supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and has won a Hillman Prize and an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, has appeared in such magazines as The Nation, Indian Country Today, and High Country News. Her novel Kickdown (Sky Horse, 2018) was shortlisted for a PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction; The Washington Post called it “an impressive debut.” She is currently working on work of creative non-fiction for Penguin Books, An American Inheritance: Jews, Lakota and the Cost of Free Land, which recently won the Whiting Nonfiction Grant. www.rebecca-clarren.com

Daniela Naomi Molnar is an artist, poet, and writer working with the mediums of language, image, paint, pigment, and place. She is also a wilderness guide, educator, and eternal student. Her work focuses on issues of climate justice, climate grief, and inter-generational trauma and healing. She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and is a founding Board member and guide with Signal Fire. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and her visual art has been shown nationally and has been recognized by numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies. She is founding Co-Editor of Leaf Litter, Signal Fire’s art and literary journal and was Art Editor at The Bear Deluxe Magazine for many years. A member of the third generation of the Holocaust and the daughter of immigrants, she lives in Portland, Oregon, in the Cascadian bioregion, atop a buried headwaters confluence, on the unceded land of the Clackamas, Chinook, Multnomah, and other Indigenous peoples. www.danielamolnar.com

Sonya Sanford is a writer, chef, and cooking instructor in Portland, Oregon. Sonya specializes in diasporic modern Jewish food, seasonal and sustainable cooking, as well as Russian Jewish cuisine. She shares her recipes and food stories at www.sonyasanford.com

Justin Jude Carroll is a visual artist, musician, podcaster, writer and father. His paintings have been shown in several Portland venues and selected for a number of private collections. As a singer-songwriter he has recorded four albums and was named Oregon’s Best Singer-Songwriter 2007. He is the host of the podcast Quality Human, quality-human.com, interviewing creatives on how they maintain their ethical and spiritual centers. He is also the author of a chapbook of poetry, “Morning in the World.” From 2013-2020 he was the Early Childhood Music Teacher at Portland Jewish Academy and has taught and led singing at several Portland-area congregations. He can be found online at www.justinjudecarroll.com. 

Jennifer Gwirtz is a dancer, choreographer and vocalist whose work lies in the intersection of dance, clowning, voice and sound art. Originally from the Philadelphia suburbs, she attended a Hebrew immersion Jewish day school, becoming alienated from Jewish practice in her early teens. She developed her signature movement style over thirty years of experimentation with imagination, sensation and precision, making the invisible visible and celebrating physical asymmetry and the beauty of limitation. From 1999 until 2017 she co-founded and directed Right Brain Performancelab, a collaborative hybrid performance ensemble. In 2016 she began a new chapter after moving to Portland with her family. She made teshuva in 2018 and at the same time started a body of work that asks questions about the female Jewish sacred. Her latest work, which will premiere in spring 2022, explores the aging female and Jewish body, with movement based on shokeling (bobbing, swaying and shaking in prayer) movements, the tradition of the badḥan (comic actor) and the layered collage of texts and voice found in Jewish texts and liturgy. She currently lives in SE Portland with her family. www.jennifergwirtz.org

Ahuva Zaslavsky was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel and moved to Portland, Oregon in 2010. She graduated from The University of the Negev, Israel with a B.A in behavioral sciences. Ahuva will complete her MFA program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Visual Studies. In her work Ahuva explores themes of memory in relation to trauma in cultural and domestic contexts, through different mediums – writing, painting, printing and sculpting. Her work has been shown in regional and national galleries including Alberta Abbey, Portland OR; Davidson Gallery, Seattle WA; MGNE – Art Complex Museum, MA; Rhode Island Watercolor Society, and Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts. She has been a visiting artist at Crow’s Shadow, OR and currently is a docent at The Jewish Museum in Portland, OR. www.ahuvasz.com

Violinist and vocalist, Michelle Alany, is a dynamic international performer & ambassador of world folk traditions. Deeply inspired by traditional music, she draws from a wealth of diverse influences and creates original folk songs in the vein of her fresh interpretations of Sephardic, Klezmer, Balkan, Mediterranean music, as well as American folk music explorations. Her music brings together years of rich independent and collaborative experience with musicians around the country and in Europe, as well as more recently in the Pacific Northwest. Michelle enjoys sharing songs as cultural vehicles for celebrating differences and appreciating similarities. Michelle’s versatility and depth as a performer will stir your soul, delight your senses, commune with your ancestors and ignite your spirit. www.michellealany.com

Jessica Rehfield is a visual artist and teacher based in Salem, Oregon. Born in Juneau, Alaska, she earned a BLA in Art from University of Alaska Southeast in 2006 and an MFA in Craft in Drawing and Painting from Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2019. Her work explores Jewish-American heritage, language and identity in a variety of mediums and formats, including drawing, painting and printmaking, social engagement works, and research of historical and contemporary Jewish experience. Rehfield’s Master’s thesis considers, in charcoal drawings, Jewish and American identities in light of the resurgence of anti-Semitism enabled and emboldened by the Trump administration. At present, Rehfield’s art bears witness to suffering in the midst of the pandemic and resurgence of anti-Semitism, explores inherited grief in conversation with the traditions of Jewish diaspora, and embraces the joy of yiddishkeit. She was Artist-in-Residence in 2020 with Atelier Meridian, where she explored the value of handwriting in the digital age using screen-printing techniques to reproduce monotypes of her parents’ and grandparents’ handwriting and was featured in The Grief Deck through Artists’ Literacies Institute and in Solo____show: Behind the Times with Alyssa Davis Gallery, NYC. www.jessicarehfield.com

Leila Wice is the creator of Mikveh Gathering, an ongoing workshop about Jewish ritual immersions, open to all genders, and anchored in tradition but not bound by it. With a background in fiber arts, costume design, and the social history of clothing, Leila explores the ways embodied, everyday practice reflects and shapes identity. Her most recent work is in ceramics, printmaking, and book arts. These projects on social-justice movements draw on her participation in the growing community of queer scholars of Talmud.