How Latina Artists Keep On Keeping On

Carmina Escobar is an extreme vocalist and intermedia artist with an active teaching practice. Born in Mexico and based in Los Angeles, Escobar investigates and expresses emotions, politics, states of alienation, and the possibilities of interpersonal connection through voice performances that experiment challenge our understandings of musicality, gender, queerness, race, the spoken word, and the foundations of human communication. She has performed in Cuba, Europe, Mexico, the United States, and Germany. Her work FIESTA PERPETUA! a communitas ritual of manifestation (2018) was included in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Los Angeles. Her new project with Micaela Tobin, HOWL SPACE is a virtual hub offering individualized teaching sessions, workshops, and salons.

The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Carribean Fragoza was raised in South El Monte, California. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including BOMB, Huizache, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is alumna of the Creative Writing MFA Program at CalArts. Fragoza co-edited East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, published February 2020 by Rutgers University Press. Her forthcoming debut collection of fiction Eat the Mouth That Feeds You will be published by City Lights in March of 2021. She is Senior Writer at the Tropics of Meta, co-editor of UC Press’s acclaimed California cultural journal, Boom California, and is also the founder of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. Carribean is currently the Coordinator of the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award at Claremont Graduate University, and she lives in the San Gabriel Valley in LA County.

Yxta Maya Murray is a writer and law professor living in Los Angeles. Her most recent works are the forthcoming novel Art Is Everything, the short story collection The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could (2020), and the play Advice & Consent (2019). Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has won a Whiting Writer’s Award and an Art Writer’s Grant, and she has been a finalist for the ASME Award in Fiction. Her art criticism can be found in Artforum, ARTnews, Artillery, and other periodicals.

Amanda Gluibizzi is an ArtSeen editor at the Brooklyn Rail. An art historian, she is the co-director of The New Foundation for Art History and the author of Art and Design in 1960s New York (forthcoming).

Dr. Amber Jamilla Musser is Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. She writes about race, sexuality, and aesthetics. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014) and Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018). She has an MSt in Women’s Studies from Oxford University and received her PhD in History of Science from Harvard University, and has held fellowships at New York University’s Draper Program in Gender Studies and Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She also writes art criticism for the Brooklyn Rail.