Artist, Currents Cohort Instigator

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Alina Nazmeeva is a Chicago-based media artist and educator, and Assistant Professor of Computation at the UIUC School of Architecture. Her practice spans XR, gaming engines, CGI, machinima, textiles, and installations, exploring the entanglements of digital and physical worlds. She holds a Master’s from MIT and has been a Taubman Fellow (2022–24), CCA Researcher-in-Residence (2022), and Strelka Institute Fellow (2017). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Future Arts Seattle, Boston Cyberarts, and Bumbershoot Festival. Her writing appears in Plat, Voices, and Media-N, among others.

Artist, Ecologist, Current Cohort Facilitator

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Alex Kosnett (they/them) is an urban planner and ecologist living in Portland, Oregon working to improve safe access for people to conservation lands in the Northwest. Alex defies the false binary separating humans and nature and believes that the most direct way to "connect" people with the natural world is to show that they've never left it. A student of bird language and wildlife tracking, Alex hears and sees stories broadcast by our more-than-human kin every day and hopes that VR and AR can expand our perception of the world and guide us to a healthier, more grounded, entwined future.

Artist, Parasitic Healing Bath

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Divine Ndemeye is a Burundo-Canadian Landscape Designer, Artist, and Educator based on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Founder of the Black+Indigenous Design Collective and Remesha Design, her practice centers social justice and community building through decolonized design and Afrofuturism. She hosts the Design Unmuted podcast and has over a decade of experience in community and urban planning. Recognized with the Olmsted Scholar Award (2020) and the BCSLA President’s Award (2022), she also serves as an Adjunct Professor at the UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

Musical Director, Artist, Production Partner

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Alexis is an award winning multidisciplinary artist, musician, speaker and human. Like a bow, she pulls from the present back into the past, with an arrow towards the future. She creates experiences with an aim towards healing and a better tomorrow.

Musically, she has decades of experience with western, Indian and Indigenous vocal traditions, along with songwriting and and composition. She also has experience with sound design, digital sound synthesis, digital processing, 3d sound and algorithmic composition. She loves to explore music from ancient to popular to the forefront of experimental sound art.

As a multimedia artist, she is active in traditional video as well as experimental video art. She has worked in software development, including on virtual environments for healing and education, with both AR and VR. She has personal in mediation and peacemaking.

Artist & Community Manager

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Gabriel-Bello Díaz, also known as GÄBO, is a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist, designer, educator, and community organizer based in Seattle. His practice bridges architecture, digital fabrication, and fine art to tell stories rooted in ancestry, identity, and futurism.

Technology Director

Creative Technologist

Suquamish Tribe

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I am the Traditional Food and Medicine Program Coordinator for Suquamish. I teach how to gather, prepare and process foods and medicine for my community. I was elected to Suquamish Tribal Council in March 2024. The work I do with gathering our foods and medicines is integral to my job and who I am as a person. Every year I assist with our Tribal school Ocean to Table curriculum where we teach the students to catch, process, smoke and can salmon. I am also involved with Indigenous Aquaculture Organization through Sea Grant.

Swinomish

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Daniel R. Smith is an artist, curator, and creative director based in Seattle. A Northwest Native enrolled in the Swinomish Tribe, he grew up on the Tulalip Indian Reservation before graduating from the University of Washington with degrees in fine art and graphic design. As a fine artist, he’s exhibited at the Center on Contemporary Art, Gallery 4Culture, Bumbershoot, Bellevue Art Museum, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Fresh Mochi, and SOIL gallery. His work can be found in the permanent collections of Seattle City Light, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, MoPop, SF MoMA, Emory University, Yale University, and University of Washington. He was recently awarded Seattle Art Book Fair’s Page Turner Fellowship to produce a limited edition book of his collage work. Deeply involved in the local design community, he spent a decade organizing poster exhibitions connecting Seattle with cities politically at odds with the U.S., specifically Havana, Tehran, Moscow, and Istanbul.

Find him on instagram at @thenanoforest

Lummi and S'Klallam Nations

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Chenoa Egawa is Lummi and S’Klallam of Washington State. Her Lummi and S’Klallam grandparents were multilingual, speaking Lummi, S’Klallam, several Coast Salish languages of neighboring tribes, and English. They were carriers of the profound ways of life of the First Peoples – as caretakers of our Mother Earth – through their interrelationship with their homelands and waterways; through their stories, songs, prayers and ways of life.

Chenoa is dedicated to upholding and amplifying the wisdom of her elders and ancestors, sharing teachings about our interconnectedness, our responsibilities to this sacred life, to one another and to the Natural world. She is a ceremonial leader, medicine carrier, singer, speaker, published author (The Whale Child and Tani’s Search for the Heart), artist and nature photographer. She is also a Senior Level Qigong Instructor through the Ling Gui International Healing Qigong School.

Snoqualmie Tribe

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I am a Two Spirit artist, an author, and enrolled member of the sduk"albix™/Snoqulamie Nation located in Snoqualmie, Washington. My published work and artworks include Prayer of Silence with Island Ink, sales with Salish Lodge and private collections.
I am a highly regarded visual artist who has received public and private commissions and had work widely displayed in galleries and museums, both in the United States and Canada. Addition-ally, l've led visual arts workshops with schools and is an active contributor in tribal community on various committees.
My work focuses on representing those with disabilities, indigenous, queer and two spirit groups within my writing and artwork. You can follow me on instagram @mistletoetrex

Children of Setting Sun, Lummi Nation

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I’m learning how to carry my People with me, how to stay grounded when I’m far from home, how to speak truth even when it makes folks uncomfortable.

Today, I carry all of it—my people, my past, my stubborn heart—into Indigenous-led storytelling, film, and community building. We don’t wait for approval. We build what we need. We speak, sing, and fight for the future our ancestors dreamed.

Enrolled Makah, Lower Elwha S’Klallam, Duwamish

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Ash Frantz is a queer Makah multidisciplinary artist based in Seattle, WA. Working across video projection, installation, performance, and photography, their practice explores the body as an extension of land, engaging Indigenous feminisms, queer temporality, and cultural resurgence shaped by distance, longing, and reconnection.

See more of their work at ashfrantz.com

Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation

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I am an enrolled member of the Chehalis Tribe and the founder of Salish Glimmer and Greenery, established in 2025. As both a wild harvester and artist, my work celebrates Indigenous culture and the natural world.

I’ve participated in a mural project in Olympia and showcased my art at Olympia Artwalk and Centralia Artrails. My work is currently available at Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Seattle, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, YUBEC in Fremont, and the Suquamish Museum gift shop.

Beyond creating art and plant remedies, I’m dedicated to cultural preservation through teaching. I’ve led workshops on salve-making and tea-blending at tribal events and community gatherings, helping others connect with traditional plant knowledge and develop their own relationships with medicinal plants.

Muckleshoot

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Valerie Segrest is an Indigenous food systems practitioner, nutrition educator, and writer whose work is rooted in Indigenous knowledge, food sovereignty, and place-based approaches to health.

Her and her daugther, Mazzy, are members of the Muckleshoot Tribe. Valerie’s life’s work is deeply informed by the lands, waters, and foodways of the Salish Sea region.

Segrest’s work emerges from long-standing relationships with community, elders, educators, and land. Rather than treating food as an isolated intervention, she approaches nourishment as a living system — shaped by ecology, culture, history, and responsibility. Her practice is guided by an ethic of care: doing work thoroughly, thoughtfully, and in ways that honor the time it takes to build trust and get things right.

Find more of Valerie’s work at https://www.valeriesegrest.com/

Muckleshoot

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Mazzy Ungaro is an artist, member of the Muckleshoot Tribe, and daughter of Valerie Segrest, an Indigenous food systems practitioner, nutrition educator, and writer whose work is rooted in Indigenous knowledge, food sovereignty, and place-based approaches to health.

Jamestown S'klallam

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Lu is a citizen of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe with roots in the Nooksack Tribe through her grandmother, Jean Cooper. She runs her own business creating traditional and traditional-adjacent regalia, jewelry, and accessories, and works to make traditional materials accessible by harvesting and trading cedar bark, nettle, salmon leather, sweetgrass, shell, and more — practicing her treaty rights through every gather.

Lu serves on the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe Cultural Committee and has worked with the Tribe's Traditional Foods and Culture program, supporting Canoe Journey, salmon ceremony, and community cultural workshops. Her art and her activism are inseparable: salmon motifs thread through her jewelry and weavings, salmon leather and bone appear in her baskets and skirts, and the health of salmon habitat anchors everything she cares about. As she puts it — there isn't a part of her work as a weaver or gatherer that salmon hasn't touched.