Carlos Santos is an Actor/Comedian based out of Los Angeles. He is best known for playing Chris Morales on the Netflix original series, Gentefied. He's also been featured on Vacation Friends (20th Century), "The Valet" (HULU), and the Prime Video series "Undone". Carlos and the members of the improv group "Spanish Aqui Presents", host a monthly all-latine comedy variety show at The Paramount in Boyle Heights. He also tours the country doing stand-up comedy. Carlos just wrapped on the first season of "Primo", a new Shea Serrano/Mike Schur comedy for Amazon Freeve. He was born and raised...

Fabian Debora was born in El Paso, Texas and began his career in 1995 as a member of the East Los Angeles Streetscapers. He was mentored by many Chicano artists and muralists, and was introduced to creative expressions of all forms, from graffiti and murals to sketching and fine art painting.

Fabian’s work has been showcased in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad, including Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Brooklyn, and throughout Latin America.

Fabian served as a counselor and the Director of Substance Abuses Services & Programming as well as a...

Albert Reyes was born in the Los Angeles suburb of Panorama City in 1971 and grew up in the working class neighborhood of El Sereno. Having been known to create artwork out of anything from what he has in his pockets to whatever he can find walking through his neighborhood. He has also shown in a gallery along with a painting by Picasso. These same strange dualities and juxtapositions are highly prevalent in his work, which tackles both conceptual and graffiti art. Recognized for his ubiquitous “GIVE “ tag, Albert has a distinctive artistic approach inspired not only by street art, comi...

From artists website: As a Chicana artivista, music and the power it invokes is at the heart of my practice as a musician, scholar, and activist. Fandango and collective songwriting as empowering methodologies have helped me and members of my communities summit into new forms of analysis and thus action. Music as a tool of dialogue. Music and its respective dance as a participatory practice are generative and artivistas like myself see these and similar practices as part of the lexicon of social justice movement. Like most fellows I want to acknowledge that I have never learned, worked and...

Melly Trochez is an artist involved with painting and assemblage searching for pop culture and its intersection with kitsch. She underscores the psychological and healing properties of art for insights and tranformations in personal experience. Although her paintings are often biographical, they underline a serch for subjective truth. Melly has studied art history at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France and graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of Fullerton. She has collaborated with graffiti artists, printmakers and has painted murals throughout California. Melly is much concerned with art education and teaching art to children with both...

As Executive Director, Allegra creates a sustainable financial foundation for Levitt LA and develops equitable community engagement strategies to connect Levitt LA to the MacArthur Park / Westlake neighborhood and beyond.  She served as the Director of Community Relations & Partnerships with Levitt LA from 2019-2023 and was recently selected to fill this role. A lifelong Angeleno, she brings 15 years of experience in the non-profit field, focusing on community organizing, youth development, arts, and culture. She received her education in the communities where she has worked—Pasadena City College and UC Santa Cruz—earning a BA in Community Studies and Art Histo...

A pioneer of Chicano rock, Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara performed with Frank Zappa, Johnny Otis, Bo Diddley, Tina Turner, and Celia Cruz, though he is best known as the front man of the 1970s experimental rock band Ruben And The Jets. Here he recounts how his youthful experiences in the barrio La Veinte of Santa Monica in the 1940s prepared him for early success in music and how his triumphs and seductive brushes with stardom were met with tragedy and crushing disappointments. Brutally honest and open, Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer is an often hilarious and self-critical l...

Narsiso Martinez’s drawings and mixed media installations include multi-figure compositions set amidst agricultural landscapes. Drawn from his own experience as a farmworker, Martinez’s work focuses on the people performing the labors necessary to fill produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. Martinez’s portraits of farmworkers are painted, drawn, and expressed in sculpture on discarded produce boxes collected from grocery stores. In a style informed by 1930s-era Social Realism and heightened through use of found materials, Martinez makes visible the difficult labor and onerous conditions of the “American farmworker,” itself a compromised piece of language owing to the ind...

Los Angeles artist Ramón Vargas makes paintings that amplify and investigate the cultural reality of Brown communities. Utilizing a representational style, he alternately challenges, celebrates, and subverts prevailing concepts of identity, tradition, and interpersonal relationships. Drawing on his own life experiences, Ramón’s figurative paintings blend realism with a surreal sense of color and place, often incorporating heavy symbolism, repeating patterns, and flat geometrical elements. Throughout his career, he has taught art for non-profit and grassroots community organizations, and is a known mentor for arts education and community outreach in Los Angeles and Orange County. In addition to p...

Valerie J. Bower is a photographer based in Los Angeles. She uses childhood nostalgia, and the visuals and experiences of growing up in the working-class L.A. Harbor Area as influences in her work. Her subtle, dream-like, monochrome street photography show a softer, feminine point of view on typically masculine themes and subjects, such as lowrider, street, punk, and skate culture. Her work focuses primarily on brown and black cultures of Los Angeles, and in other parts of the U.S. (including Northern California, Las Vegas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah). She also documented lowrider/ West Coast culture in...

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. (b. 1989, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an artist whose work developed from close observation of his father’s skillful trade in commercial sign painting. He draws inspiration in the permanence of hand-painted signage and the physical weathering remnants of Los Angeles to narrate his own familial histories of labor and image-making.

​Gonzalez’s paintings, while seemingly passive still-lifes, excavate the sedimented interactions that happen on everyday public surfaces. His multi-layered works function as contemporary palimpsests, surfaces in which the original facade has been effaced to make room for later writing but of...

Vel Nine aka Vel the Wonder, is a rapper from Baldwin Park, California and based out of Los Angeles who gained a substantial social and internet following first posting a few incomplete verses uploaded on Soundcloud before she stepped in front of the cameras and introduced the world to her soothingly consistent delivery reminiscent of Bahamadia and Guru.

Without even having an established stage name, Vel's life changed one shoot in 2012. A half-dozen women ready to showcase their rhymes assembled on a rooftop overlooking Los Angeles for The Cypher Effect YouTube series. She has since released a...

"My interdisciplinary art practice interrogates the long history of displacement in the Americas, starting with Indigenous dispossession and genocide to current issues around gentrification, evictions, and homelessness. At its root, however, it is a critical reflection on the commodification of land as private property and the issues that arise out of this. I articulate these subjects through printmaking, installation, and sculpture, to outline the contested use of space and the ways that social and political policies have shaped our contemporary urban environment. I am particularly interested in creating work that exists in the intersections between theory and praxis, articulating...

Deladeso is the art persona created by Richie Velazquez. Based out of Riverside California, he has been developing his Digital Death and Grime art aesthetic since 2012. As the originator of grime art, he pays homage to those that have molded himself into the Spookek that he is today!

Yolanda González was born into a family whose artistic heritage dates back to 1877. Her world is one of curiosity, demonstrating her love of people and their surroundings. González’s travels in different countries, the bonds forged with individuals in those places, and the resulting transformative experiences are reflected in her art and her life. She is known for her strong, bold brush strokes of color and texture, intent on evoking imagination and emotion.

González studied at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design after winning a painting competition that awarded her a scholarship to the p...

Los Angeles based multimedia artist Erica G. Peralta uses video, cardboard sculptures resembling East Los Angeles architecture and, what she calls, “floorplan paintings” to reflect and dissect the institutions of her Mexican American roots.

Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories.

Nakagawa has been working on a series of semi-autobiographic sound-architecture/tactile sound experiences, utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of historic interiors; Peace Resonance; Hiroshima/Wendover combines recordings of the interiors of the Hiroshima Atomic Dome (Hiroshima, Japan) and Wendover Hangar (Utah); Conical Sound; Antoni Gaudi and Simon Rodia combines recordings of the interiors of Watts Towers (Los Angeles) and the Sagrada Familia (Barcelona, Spain). Premiered in 2023, Point of Turn, is his first vibratory...

Edgar "Meshlee" Modesto of Buyepongo is the group's vocalist and also a percussionist who plays conga and guacharaca, a thin percussive instrument that's used in cumbia. The group's line-up is fluid, but at the center of it are Modesto and his brother Randy, who plays bass, as well as Jorge "Yuka" Valleo, who plays accordion, clarinet and guitar in addition to singing, and Angel Hernandez, who plays saxophone, clarinet and flute. 

The musical backgrounds of the members of Buyepongo run the gamut from punk to hip-hop to jazz to metal. The band itself began life as a c...

Salvador de la Torre is an artist and educator, born in Guadalajara Jalisco, raised in Laredo, Texas and currently resides in Long Beach, CA. De la Torre earned a Master of Fine Art from California State University, Fullerton and a Bachelor of Art from Texas A&M International University. The artist has exhibited in and around Southern California, Texas, Georgia, Tijuana, Taiwan, and Berlin. They have been invited to speak at a TED X Conference in Laredo Texas, at Washington State University, Eastern Washington University, and Georgia State University Athens.

Liliflor was born and raised in Los Angeles, her inspiration comes from her upbringing, family, community and underground cultural movements. As a first generation Mexican American “Chicana” she navigated thru L.A’ art scene during the 80’s and 90’s hip hop movement. Graffiti subculture was a critical part in her development, inspiration and path towards a professional art and educational career. Liliflor hones her artistic ability to create vital images on canvas and walls that are representative of Angelinos. She is a cultural art educator championing youth in the arts, using art as a tool for education, cultural awareness, civic enga...

MICHAEL ALVAREZ is a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Alvarez is a figurative painter with a fascination for human interactions, experiences and history. His paintings pull from his collection of visual artifacts, stories and his own daily experiences and observations. The artist describes the subject matter of his work as simultaneously dysfunctional and celebratory. Alvarez’ use of technical details and distortion add nuance to the content of his paintings.

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Judithe Hernández first won acclaim as a member of the celebrated Chicano artist collective Los Four. The collective would become a major force in the Chicano Art Movement and the first Chicano artists to break through the mainstream museum barrier. After graduating from Otis Art Institute in 1974, she and Carlos Almaraz earned recognition as muralists during the renowned Los Angeles mural renaissance of the 1970's. Together they painted murals for labor rights leader Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union, as well as community murals, such as the Ramona Gardens Housing Projects in East Los Angeles where t...

Luis Guizar is a Los Angeles based filmmaker. He has a history in theater and acting.  He is Executive Produce and Director of Photography on the movie 'Hope, Soledad.' He is part owner of an independent production studio.

John Valadez is a realist painter and muralist whose works has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the U.S., Europe, and Mexico. In the 1970s and 1980s Valadez worked actively with Chicano Arts collectives such as Los Four and Centro de Arte Publico in Highland Park.

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Find JOHN at:
Instagram: @JOHNVALADEZART
Website: https://johnvaladezart.com
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https://www.espacio1839.com
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Recorded on TASCAM Mixcast and Mics

Carolina A. Miranda is a Los Angeles Times columnist focused on art and design, who also makes regular forays into other areas of culture, including performance, books and digital life. In her years at The Times, she has covered the ways in which communities are rethinking the nature of monuments, how architecture is shifting to accommodate a denser Los Angeles, the significance of political graphics in the post-Roe world and how narco-culture has permeated TV and the internet. She was a winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism and the 2021 Sigma Delta Chi Award presented by the...

Sergio Teran graduated with a BFA from Art Center College of Design and an MA in Studio Art from New York University. He lives and works in Los Angeles where he is also an Associate Professor of Art at Cerritos College.

Sergio Teran’s studio process filters divergent memories, real and imagined places and current events with cultural symbologies from everyday life and reassembles them into richly painted narrative tableaus. For the past 20 years, his paintings have investigated the particularities of a specific cultural identity, originating from intensely personal reflections that are elaborated through a struggle with pr...

Self taught artists, Adriana Carranza and Alfonso Aceves, are Kalli Arte Collective from Boyle Heights. "Kalli is our home.The foundation of our culture. It allows for our survival and protection. We must understand that the status of our bodies, homes, and community reflects the status of our spirits."

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Instagram: @KALLIARTE
Website: https://kalliartecollective.square.site
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Gustavo Hernández García, tenor, began his singing career through the Young Musicians Program of UC Berkeley, where he studied with renowned baritone David Tigner.  Before completing his first year of voice lessons, Mr. Hernández sang the tenor solos in Handel’s Messiah with the University of Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Hernández’s forays into Oratorio and Concert repertoire as a soloist include Mendehlsson’s Elijah, The Messiah, The Mozart Requiem, Rossini’s Stabat Mater, Mozart’s Coronation Mass, the Mozart Vespers, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast and others.

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Dorian Wood is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Using subject matter informed by their own perspective as a genderfluid brown person, a child of Costa Rican and Nicaraguan immigrants, and an autodidact, Wood’s intent of “infecting” spaces and ideologies with their artistic practice is born from a desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people.

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Website: https://www.do...

Daniela Garcia Hamilton (b.1995) is a first generation Mexican-American painter. Her work revisits the rituals and traditions she experienced as a child of immigrant parents. Color and pattern is integrated throughout her work as she describes the vibrancy of her cultural traditions through portraits of her family members. Settings are fabricated to draw attention to shifts in immigration policies, each shift in color for the backgrounds represents the color her family home in Guanajuato was painted, at the time of the policy change. Contemporary American tile patterns are used as the veil through which she remembers these events. As...

Sonia Romero is a Los Angeles artist known for her paper-cut and printmaking aesthetics which she incorporates into both her fine art and public art commissions. Born in 1980, she grew up in an artistic household in Echo Park before formally studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. After returning to California, she began working as a public artist, and was the artist in residence at Avenue 50 Studio in Northeast Los Angeles from 2007-2014.

Elmer Guevara (b.1990) was born and raised in Los Angeles and is currently working bicoastally in New York City. In the 1980s, his parents fled a war-torn El Salvador finding refuge in the City of Angels. Along with South Central’s vibrant energy and the culture his parents brought with them, he became inspired to reflect on his upbringing and the hybridity of cultures. He often constructs narratives by sampling family photos from his youth, reframing compositions that form dialogue about identity and concepts of inter-generational trauma.    

      Furthermore, he depicts observations from his own and neighboring immigrant families...

Marcos Trinidad is the Center Director at the Audubon Center at Debs Park and also works as a Senior Regional Manager at TreePeople. He was born and raised in Northeast Los Angeles, where his family has lived for 75 years, Marcos has deep roots in the community. Marcos’ formal education is in geology and anthropology.

For two decades, Marcos has advanced equity, diversity and inclusion in the environmental movement, including co-directing LA’s Environmental Professionals of Color chapter. Through that work, Marcos promoted and sponsored forums for people of color working in environmentally-related careers. He was recognized by the...