Sarah McKenzie (she/her) is a visual artist and one of the co-founders of Tilt West. She has exhibited her paintings nationally, including shows with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Yale School of Architecture, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Her work is represented in Denver by David B. Smith Gallery. Since 2020, Sarah has been working on an extended project researching and painting the architecture of prisons. In 2021, she was awarded the Marion International Fellowship for the Visual and Performing Arts to support her research into carceral space. That same year, she also began teaching art classes inside the Colorado Department of Corrections. In 2024, Sarah co-founded Impact Arts, a non-profit that creates and supports exhibition opportunities for formerly and currently incarcerated artists.

Bobby LeFebre (he/him) is an award-winning writer, performer, and cultural worker from Denver, Colorado. He is a two-time Grand Slam Champion, a National Poetry Slam Finalist, an Individual World Poetry Slam Finalist, and a two-time TEDx speaker. His work has been showcased nationally and internationally on NPR, the Huffington Post, and The Guardian, and the LA Times. LeFebre has performed at hundreds of cultural events, social actions, detention centers, conferences, and colleges and universities across the United States and abroad. He is co-founder of Café Cultura, a non-profit organization that uses poetry as a tool for youth development and he is also founder of #WeAreNorthDenver, a grassroots and digital campaign dedicated to using art as an entry point for discussing gentrification in Denver. LeFebre has been named a 100 Colorado creative by Westword Magazine, is a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures fellow, and has recently been appointed by the Mayor of Denver to serve as the Co-Chair of the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Metro State University and a master’s degree in Art, Literature, and Culture from the University of Denver.

Cortney Lane Stell (she/her) is the Executive Director + Chief Curator of Black Cube, a nomadic contemporary art museum based in Denver, Colorado.  Stell is currently serving her second term on Denver’s Commission on Cultural Affairs, as appointed by the mayor. She has held independent curatorial practice since 2006, which has included curating numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally for museums, university galleries, biennials and art events. Stemming from a philosophical interest in art as communication, Stell has organized exhibitions that focus on artworks experimental in both conceptual and material nature, including exhibitions with artists such as Liam Gillick, Cyprien Gaillard, Daniel Arsham, and Shirley Tse.  In her role as the Executive Director + Chief Curator of Black Cube she has art directed dozens of site-specific artworks including works by SANGREE, Adriana Corral, Marguerite Humeau, and Jennifer Ling Datchuk—to name a few. Stell holds a MA from the European Graduate School in Switzerland where she is also a PhD candidate in Media Communications.

Suzi Q. Smith (she/her) is an artist, activist, and educator who lives with her brilliant daughter in Denver, Colorado. She has shared her poetry on stages throughout the U.S., sharing stages with Nikki Giovanni, Talib Kweli, the late Gil Scott Heron, and many more over the years. Her work has appeared in Union Station Magazine, Suspect Press, Muzzle Magazine, Malpais Review, Peralta Press, and more, and her collection of poems, Thirteen Descansos, is available from Penmanship Books. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Poetry Slam, Inc.

Kelly Sears (she/her) is an experimental animator that cuts up and collages imagery from American culture and politics. Her work draws on documentary and parafictional forms of storytelling, shifting between the official and unconfirmed. Her award-winning films have screened at festivals such as Sundance, South by Southwest, American Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Festival, Off+Camera Film Festival, Poland, Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil, France, and Tricky Women in Austria. She’s also had retrospective programs of her short work at Anthology Film Archives in NYC, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Portland Art Museum, and the SF Cinematheque. Sears is currently an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she teaches advanced filmmaking, animation, experimental documentary, and media archeology and is a co-editor for NOW! A Journal of Urgent Praxis.

Yong Cho (he/him) is a local architect and Principal of Studio Completiva, who is passionate about affordable housing and sustainable design.  Yong is a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture and has taught at Yale University and the University of Colorado.

Gregg Deal (he/him) is a husband, father, and a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe. He is a provocative contemporary artist-activist. Much of Deal’s work deals with Indigenous identity and pop culture, touching on issues of race relations, historical consideration, and stereotype. With his work — including paintings, mural work, performance art, filmmaking and spoken word — Deal critically examines issues within Indian country such as decolonization, the Native mascot issue, and appropriation.

Deal was recently showcased on PBS Arts District. He was a Native Arts Artist-in-Residence at the Denver Art Museum in 2015–2016 and an Artist-in-Residence at UC Berkeley for the 2017–2018 academic year. His art has been exhibited nationally since 2002. Deal has lectured widely at prominent educational institutions and museums including: Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Columbia University, New York City, NY; University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA; Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC; Creative Mornings, DC and Denver; University of Colorado, Boulder, CO; and Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO. His television appearances have included PBS, “The Daily Show,” and W. Kamau Bell’s “Totally Biased,” as well as appearances on Aljazeera, ESPN, and ABC News.

Courtenay Finn (she/her) is currently the Curator at the Aspen Art Museum (AAM) in Aspen, Colorado, where she has curated numerous solo and group shows, each of which has used the exhibition as a framework to support artistic practice, offering the time for new research, or the support to work in a new medium for the first time. Exhibitions at the AAM include the group shows Gravity & Grace (2017), The Revolution Will Not Be Gray(2016–17), A Fragile But Marvelous Life (2015–16), Stories We Tell Ourselves (2015–16), The Blue of Distance (2015), and The Future Yesterday (2014–15). She has also curated first museum solo exhibitions by artists Anna Sew Hoy (2015–16) and Alice Channer (2014–15) alongside large-scale exhibitions of new work by artists Mickalene Thomas (2016), and Haris Epaminonda (2017). Prior to her time at the AAM, Finn was the Curator at Art in General in New York (2010–2014) where she curated Art in General’s first International New Commission with artist Mounira Al Solh (2012), and organized their first Collaborative Commission, a large-scale sculptural commission with artist Halsey Rodman and the High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, CA (2014). She was also the co-curator of North by Northeast, the Latvian Pavilion for the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale (2013). Finn has an MA in Curatorial Practice from the California College of The Arts and a BFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Laura Conway (she/her) is a filmmaker, DJ, and DIY organizer and advocate based in Denver, Colorado. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Film Making at the University of Colorado Boulder. Through parties, political action, and community planning Laura works at the intersection of geography, urban planning, and underground art. Laura is a co-partner in the film collective chitchat which organizes alternative film events. They have exhibited in Denver, Boulder, Houston, Austin, Berlin, Prague, and Trieste. Overwhelmed by the complexity of life in late capitalism, she responds with digitized absurdity.  She plays clarinet, sings poorly, and embraces all things amateur. She is the CFO of the global analogue tape corporation BorpCorp©.

As the executive director and founder of ArtHyve, Jessie de la Cruz (she/her) is an archivist and community arts organizer with more than a decade of experience. Through ArtHyve, de la Cruz aims to preserve and document the creative processes of living artists and cultural heritage in Metro Denver. De la Cruz has a myriad of skills pulling from her background and education in art history, exhibition design, and library and information science. As the archivist at the Clyfford Still Museum, she is the only full-time arts archivist in the state of Colorado.