Alison Kotin is an adjunct professor of graphic design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She is also a media arts instructor and marketing and outreach coordinator at the Urbano Project, a nonprofit studio and gallery space dedicated to fostering artistic partnerships between urban teens and adult artists. She exhibits works in venues around the Boston area, most recently at a 2012 solo show, Listen Close, at Boston’s Bromfield Gallery. Alison’s interactive media work explores the interplay of performance and digital media through motion- and touch-activated pieces modeled on musical instruments. Her projects invite play, creation, and audience participation, incorporating sound and movement through site-specific installations and interactive digital objects. Her writing has appeared in Teaching Artists’ Journal, Youth Media Reporter, and The Experience of Dynamic Media. She holds an MFA from the Dynamic Media Institute at MassArt and a BA from Brown University in English literature.

Stella Aguirre McGregor is founder and director of the Urbano Project, a nonprofit studio and exhibition space in Jamaica Plain, MA, dedicated to fostering partnerships between urban teens and professional artists. She has been an artist and cultural worker for over twenty-five years, working on projects in Boston, Macedonia, New Orleans, and Taiwan. As an artist, curator, and arts administrator, she is interested in exploring the role of art in society, as an integral part of life, and as a catalyst for social change. Stella has served as executive director of the Cloud Foundation, as a program manager at the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and as a senior arts administrator for the Boston Central Artery/Tunnel project’s public art program. In 1986 she founded The Space, a nonprofit artist-run gallery in Boston’s South End, where she produced more than two hundred projects encompassing visual, performing, and public arts with the participation of youth and community members.

DeAnna Pellecchia is an artist and educator working in the medium of live performance. As a trained dancer, choreographer, and aerialist, she has been featured in rodeos, operas, plays, fashion shows, magazines, books, movies, and music videos and has performed and taught throughout the United States and India. As co–artistic director/choreographer of KAIROS Dance Theater, she creates performance experiences for the stage, site-specific landscapes, and nontraditional public spaces. As a teaching artist, DeAnna specializes in working with inner-city teenagers, both arts-identified and non-arts-identified, and has taught at a number of schools and programs in the Boston area. She is a principal dancer with the New York–based Paula Josa-Jones/Performance Works, resides on the dance faculty at Boston University, teaches at Boston Ballet, and is a consultant to VSA Massachusetts, where she designs curriculum for arts-integrated education for the Boston Public Schools.

Ingrid Schatz, a Boston-based dancer and choreographer, received her BFA in dance from the University of Massachusetts in 1997 and has made a career of pushing the boundaries of dance and performance, evident in her study of aerial dance, horse handling, stilt walking, and authentic movement. She currently collaborates with visual artist Michael Dowling and dancer/choreographer DeAnna Pellecchia, with whom she founded KAIROS Dance Theater. Ingrid has collaborated or worked with Bennett Dance Company, Nicola Hawkins Dance Company, Caitlin Corbett Dance Company, Joyce Lim, Ernesto Pujol, Jin-Wen Yu, and others and is a principal dancer and rehearsal director for Paula Josa-Jones/Performance Works, with which she has toured, taught, collaborated, and choreographed throughout the United States, France, and Russia.

Shaw Pong Liu, violinist and composer, creates performances that interplay improvised music, multidisciplinary collaboration, and audience interaction. Recent creative projects include Soldiers’ Tales Untold, a musical narrative about war blending veterans’ stories, live music, and audience dialogue, and 2,3,4 . . . , a collaborative performance installation with painters, choreographers, dancers, musicians, and interactive technology. She is founder of the 99% String Quartet and SQUEE (String Quartets Everywhere), which brings live string quartets to cafes, subways, and other public spaces in Boston. An avid explorer of new sounds, Shaw Pong has premiered new works with numerous groups in the Boston area and received commissions for her compositions. She has held artist residencies at the Blue Sky Project and Acadia National Park and is a teaching artist with the Silk Road Project, the Urbano Project, and Young Audiences.