Contributor Bios – February 2022
Rahne Alexander is an intermedia artist and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. She is a 2021 graduate of the Intermedia+Digital Arts MFA at UMBC, and a 2021 Baker Artist Prize Awardee. Her works in video, performance, music, and painting have been exhibited across the U.S. and around the world, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, and MIX NYC. She performs music as 50 Foot Woman and as the front woman of the rock band Santa Librada. She is a contributor to BmoreArt, and her writing has been anthologized in OnCurating #42, Love, You (Urban Ivy, 2020), and the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica (Cleis, 2011). Her OutWrite-award-winning chapbook of collected essays Heretic to Housewife was published by Neon Hemlock in 2019. Learn more at rahne.com.
Mary E. Croy lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she works as an administrative assistant. She spent nine years teaching English Language Learners in Ha Noi, Viet Nam. During her free time, Mary likes reading poetry and hanging out with her cats, Buster and Gabby. Her work has appeared in Better than Starbucks, Woven Tale Press, and Valley Voices, among others.
Teresa Duggan is a Baltimore city photographer and artist at large. Found humor, ephemeral scenes and street surprises are #1 these days, but anything’s possible. See more photos in this CityPaper feature, Baker Artist Portfolio, or Instagram.
Marcelo Funes-Gallanzi and Raquel-IA — Rachael-IA started life 10 years ago as a collaborative project between a small Mexico-based collective (with members from México, Israel, United Kingdom and Italy) and The Goodwill Company of Guildford, UK (which provided the general cognition engine at the heart of the system) with the aim of developing a virtual artist able to take in an arbitrary text and return an “artistic” aesthetically-pleasing representation of it… a first stab at ekphrastic art if you will! The group is led by Marcelo Funes-Gallanzi, who completed his Ph.D. in engineering at the University of Warwick in 1995 and was chosen as the most influential person in Artificial Intelligence in the United Kingdom in 2014 by the British Innovation Council for his work on language simplification and its application to Raquel. This work is useful for two main reasons: it helps us understand the brain and human creativity and it helps improve artificial intelligence systems. Rachael-IA uses vocabulary-reduction and a free-association of ideas between what the user writes and ekphrastic descriptions of a knowledge base of artworks; sentence by sentence. Once the visitor asks her to generate an image, she applies her skills about painting in order to produce an original new piece of art, representative of the text provided. Much remains to be done – such as adding styles, textures, synesthesia and symbolism – and we are particularly keen to find collaborators in the Arts & literary community to help us expand the knowledge base of artworks and also to refine her “artistic skills”. Learn more at www.ekphrasis.net, on Instagram @ekphrastic_ai_art, Twitter @EkphrasticA, or Facebook.com/ekphrasis.net.
Anai Gonzalez is a poet living in California whose main interests range from exploring trauma and grief in their work, as well as uplifting underrepresented LGBTQ+ and people of color’s voices in poetry. Anai had three poems published in their best friend Jeramiah Harris’s debut poetry collection, Empty Canvases in 2019, and will soon be graduating from the University of Southern California with a Business Administration major with an emphasis in Entrepreneurship & Finance.
Vin Grabill received his B.A. degree in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 1971 and a Master of Science in Visual Studies degree from the M.I.T. Center For Advanced Visual Studies in 1981. After teaching Video Art at the Massachusetts College of Art from 1984-1988, he joined the faculty of the UMBC Department of Visual Arts in 1988 where he continued to teach video art until retiring in 2020. Grabill served as chairperson of the department from 2008-2015. Grabill has been creating and exhibiting works in video art formats since 1979. His single channel video work and installation work utilizing video have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Since retiring from UMBC, he has begun painting again, returning to his artistic roots, as evidenced by the vintage painting from 1970 submitted for this issue. Thanks to Julie Simon for technical assistance in the making of “Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet have a problem.”
María Cristina Hall is a Mexican American poet and translator. She studied creative writing at Columbia University and now lives in Mexico City, where she’s doing a PhD on return migration and the arts at UNAM. Her upcoming Malaria Dreams will be published by the Emergent Translators Collective, following Herring Publishers’ edition in Querétaro, Mexico. She recently translated The Dead Won’t Die Here (Editorial Argonáutica) and co-translated Goodbye, Ramona (Fum d’Estampa Press) and Left Parenthesis (Open Letter Books) with Meg Berkobien. Her poetry can be read at Sea Foam Mag, Leveler, Topografías del sueño, and The Fem. Her book, Fantasía Fértil (Medusa Books), is now available in Spain.
Lindsay McKeough is a New York native stay at home mom. She was brought into the art world by her late Nana at the age of 2. She mostly works with acrylic, watercolors, pen and charcoal. Most recently, she illustrated the children’s book, An Ocean of Emotion, published earlier this month. See more of her work here.
Derek Roper has dedicated his creativity and ingenuity to the cosmic mythos. Derek primarily works with digital art, but also has a passion for clay work and wood burning. He is always working with new mediums to portray his art. See more of his work at The Mad Artist’s Studio.
S.F. Wright lives and teaches in New Jersey. His work has appeared in Hobart, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, and Elm Leaves Journal, among other places. His short story collection, The English Teacher, is forthcoming from Cerasus Poetry, and his website is sfwrightwriter.com.
