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Brad Decker is a composer, educator, and performer of contemporary concert music, whose works often incorporate electronic, electroacoustic, or interactive media. His recent works explore the interaction of acoustic instruments and electronics to create immersive composite textures.

Voted Kansas City’s Best Musician 2018 and 2019 (PitchKC), singer and harpist Calvin Arsenia has built a reputation for turning the arts world on its head. Arsenia’s angelic, classically-trained voice soars over audiences, enchanting even the fussiest of fans, beckoning them to join him as he flirts between genres.

My experience as a refugee influenced and shaped the content of my early artistic practice. Living through the Yugoslavian war has led me to create work that addresses themes of culture, immigration, and identity. These themes often connect to issues of conflict, discrimination, and the complexities of living in unfamiliar cultural environments.

Addoley Dzegede's work investigates notions of belonging, migration and location, and hybrid identities. Through a variety of media and techniques, she explores the metaphoric potential of materials, textile traditions, notions of “authenticity” and the ways color and pattern are used to as a means to assign belonging.

Jana Harper is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the themes and tensions between materiality and transcendence, chance encounters and human willfulness, relationships and connectivity, and human acts of meaning making. With a background in somatic practices, she works in both individual and collaborative settings and is interested in how the burdens of history can be transformed through gestures of love and empathy.

Megan Kaminsky is a poet, essayist, and professor.
My writing and teaching focus on connecting to our shared ecosystem as a source of knowledge and inspiration for strategies to live in their world, to grieve and heal after loss, and to re-align thinking towards kinship, community, and sustainability. My work is informed by interdisciplinary research in social welfare, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, as well as previous work in the healing arts and at non-profit environmental organizations.

My work engages recorded histories, ancient mythologies and natural phenomena to consider relationships between our bodies and land, between the present and deep time, and between the earth’s revolution around the sun and our own movement within that system. Employing materials such as light, metal leaf, cement, yarn, fabric, and handmade paper combined with elements from the natural world, I create installations, objects, and drawings that consider our position within larger structures to imagine how to contend with an uncertain future.

cerca trova (chair∙kuh tro∙vuh) is a contemporary repertory company founded by artistic director Kyle Mullins in 2018. Based in Kansas City, MO, Cerca Trova’s mission is present dance works both new and historical by local, regional, and national choreographers. “Cerca trova”, meaning “seek and find”, defines Mullins’ approach to the creative process. Pose questions, search for answers, and move towards them. Collaboration and dialogue are essential to our process. Cerca Trova is committed to bringing high quality works of art to Kansas City audiences in both traditional and non-traditional venues.

MAURA PELLETTIERI is a poet, prose writer, and performer. They teach ecopoetics and embodiment in the San Francisco Bay Area and virtually, and serve artists with writing, editing, and consulting. They received their BA in English Literature at SUNY Buffalo and their MFA in Writing at Washington University in St. Louis. They are the founder of Crystal and Flame, an experimental art writing journal.