Yexandra "Yex" Diaz is an award-winning poet, educator, and community leader who uses poetry and storytelling as tools for connection, healing, and cultural preservation. A two-time Connecticut Grand Slam Champion and New Haven Poet Laureate, she has performed on stages across the country, including the August Wilson Cultural Center and Woolsey Hall alongside the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. As the current Slam Master of Verbal Slap, she has helped lead Connecticut’s premier adult poetry team to two regional championship titles, earning a #1 national ranking.

 

Beyond the stage, Yex serves as Artistic Director of THE WORD, a literary arts organization dedicated to cultivating storytelling and creative expression. She is also an AIR Collaborative Facilitator with the Connecticut Office of the Arts, supporting communities in building sustainable creative economies. Her commitment to arts education has led her to serve as a visiting instructor at institutions including UConn and Trinity College.​

 

Jonathan “Johnny Komodo” Williams is a photographer and image-maker based in New York and New Jersey whose practice moves between the analog and the constructed, the personal and the ceremonial. Working across 120mm film, cyanotype, and digital processes, he builds visual worlds rooted in the belief that the idea and the making are inseparable. His still life collage work takes prayer as its organizing principle, treating the physical objects that accumulate across a life as devotional instruments, each one a vessel for desire, memory, and intention. The cyanotype process lends itself naturally to this inquiry, its slow exposure echoing the patience of ritual. Williams draws on pre-transatlantic West African spiritual traditions, domestic ritual, and the quiet gestures of everyday life to locate the metaphysical inside the familiar: a fishing line cast over still water, a candle lit in a votive rack, an object left behind by someone who has completed their time here.

 

www.johnnykomodo.com IG:@johnnykomodo​

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Laz is an oil painter whose work defines an emerging style he calls surreal impressionism — a movement characterized by the depiction of fleeting moments in nature through dreamlike imagery. Often drawing inspiration from the landscapes of Southern New England, he examines the relationship between imagination, the natural world, and the liminal space between them.

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Informed by his first-generation Haitian American upbringing, Laz views art as an act of vulnerability. His paintings give outward form to inward conviction, inviting viewers to reflect on their own experiences with honesty and wonder. As a Haitian American artist based in Connecticut, he is particularly interested in how personal history, environment, and imagination shape the evolving American experience. Through surreal impressionism, Laz explores beauty, hope, and redemption, offering glimpses of a future made possible through both remembrance and imagination.

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https://thelazrose.wixsite.com/mysite​

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Allyse Corbin (she/her) is a maker based in New Haven, CT. As an arts administrator, photographer, performer, and crafter, she loves surrounding herself with creative people. Allyse is currently interested in using upcycled materials that some people deem as trash as inspiration for art materials.

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tinyurl.com/akcphotos

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Kris St. Louis is a multidisciplinary performer, dancer, vocalist, and choreographer whose work spans theater, musical performance, and contemporary movement. Kris’s recent performance credits include Bacchae [or, Present Madness] at the Yale Cabaret, for colored girls in a Yale workshop reading, A Chorus Line with the Yale Dramat, and Mother Tongue, a Yale senior thesis production. With training in acting, voice, and dance, Kris has performed across modern, contemporary, experimental, tap, Fosse, Graham, Horton, jazz, ballet, hip hop, Kathak, and African dance forms. Kris is currently active with Yale Dance Lab Company and Yale Modern Dance Company, and brings a dynamic blend of theatricality, musicality, and movement to collaborative performance projects.​

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Mithra Seyedi remains anonymous by choice.