A. Andrews (they/them) is a 33-year-old disabled queer writer and illustrator based in Minneapolis, MN. Their first published graphic novel, A Quick and Easy Guide to Sex & Disability (Oni/Limerence Press) was released in June of 2020, and they’re currently illustrating their second published project: a young adult graphic novel about the Stonewall Riots, for First Second. They are a Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar and are the creator of Autostraddle’s Oh, Hey!, a bi-monthly autobiographical webcomic about being queer, sick, and sometimes Embarrassing.

Andrea Leigh Shockling (she/her) is an artist based in Pittsburgh and Queens. She’s worked on Broadway and in regional theatres as a painter, scenic designer, and educator. Andrea’s comics have appeared in several award-winning anthologies, and she has published two volumes of her ongoing project SUBJECTIVE LINE WEIGHT, sharing the real stories of women’s bodies we’re not supposed to talk about. Her comic strip ELBOW ROOM was featured in the Pittsburgh Current, a bi-weekly alternative newspaper. She is currently working on her graphic memoir A DANGLING CONVERSATION. Andrea prefers cats to dogs, watercolors to acrylics, music to silence, light to dark, digital to analog, and order to chaos. She misses her mom, loves her son, and will probably never be caught up on her reading.

Christa Couture (she/her) is an award-winning performing and recording artist, non-fiction writer and broadcaster. She is also proudly Indigenous, queer, disabled and a mom. Her sixth recording, Safe Harbour, was released March 2020. Her writing has been published in Room, Shameless and Augur magazines and cbc.ca. As a speaker and storyteller, she has addressed audiences for The Walrus Talks, CBC’s DNTO, Moses Znaimer’s ideaCity and Imaginate in Port Hope, ON. She is a frequent contributor to CBC Radio’s Now or Never and The Next Chapter, and she is a weekday afternoon host on 106.5 ELMNT FM in Toronto, ON.

Cora Hickoff (she/her) is an animator, illustrator, and educational designer passionate about integrating art and technology. In May 2020, she graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a BFA in Art and a Minor in Educational Design through CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). Hickoff has been drawing ever since she was a child — always striving to create art that is visually unexpected and just a little bit different. She loves combining her unique artistic aesthetic with her technical skills to inspire and emotionally move viewers and teach complex scientific and psychological concepts. Hickoff has programming, sound design, stop motion, and digital special effects experience and she enjoys creating immersive spaces in both the physical world (museums, parks, theaters) and virtual world (animated stories, interactive apps, video games).

Georgia Webber (she/her) is a queer, disabled comics artist, writer, and educator. She adores teaching and leads by exemplifying curiosity in the classroom. Her philosophy is that teaching is a relationship first, allowing the learning process to be fun and organic and suited to each learner’s specific access needs. Georgia is best known for her graphic memoir, Dumb: Living without a Voice (Fantagraphics 2018), the chronicle of her severe vocal injury and sustained vocal condition, which makes using her voice painful (though she manages it well these days). Georgia’s comics have been published in major magazines and studied extensively by the Graphic Medicine community. Her most recent publication was a collaboration with dancer, athlete, and artist Vivian Chong to create Vivian’s graphic memoir about losing her sight: Dancing After TEN (Fantagraphics 2020). Learn more about Georgia’s teaching and comics work.

Honey Rosenbloom (they/them) is a Queer Cyborg Mystic, a Tool-Toting, Trailer-Towing Trans Texan Technologist, a game designer, nonprofit runner, organizer, facilitator, and programmer. They want to create spaces, words, and games that allow people to connect more deeply with themselves, others, and the ineffable infinite that is being. They are the Executive Director of Friendship Garden Game Developers, a nonprofit organization grounded in healing and restorative practices dedicated to advocating for inclusivity in the games industry. Through funding, promoting, and providing resources to game makers from historically marginalized backgrounds and curating a gentle, diverse community, they hope to show that a soft, supportive ecosystem of players and developers is the best way for the industry to flourish as a tool for collective liberation.

Heather Kelley (she/her) is an award-winning game designer, media artist, curator, and a professor with the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Her professional career began in AAA and licensed games with companies like Ubisoft, Eidos (Ion Storm), Girl Games and Behavior Interactive, and continues with independent and experimental projects, many featuring physical and sensory interfaces like smell and vibration. She is a founding member of the influential experimental game collective Kokoromi, developers of VR puzzle game SUPERHYPERCUBE, and she co-curated Joue le jeu, a groundbreaking 2012 exhibition of art games and playful installations in Paris, France.

Candace Skibba (she/her) is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in contemporary Spanish literature and film and has concentrated her research on investigating the intersection between literary and film studies and studies of the body -most notably the abnormal body. The study of the body has taken her to gender analysis, dis/ability studies, and health humanities. The convergence of her literary and cultural studies interests and pedagogical foci have led her to investigate agency and empathy in both artistic expression and classroom practices.

Gabriele Maier (she/her) is Associate Teaching Professor of German Studies and Director of the M.A. program in Global Communication and Applied Translation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Maier’s research includes literature of the 20th and 21st century and focuses primarily on travel writing, questions of home and identity, transcultural writers, graphic novels, and social justice pedagogy. She has published a co-edited anthology on questions of home, a textbook entitled Deutschland im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (Germany in the Age of Globalization), and recently a volume on curriculum development and small German program building. She has taught classes on social justice and contributed an article to the MLA Handbook Strategies and Perspectives on Social Justice Work. Being a fellow of the “How Well?“ project, funded by the Center for the Arts in Society at CMU, provided her with the opportunity to study questions of wellness and well-being among CMU’s student population and helped her understand what could be done to improve well-being on CMU’s campus.