MICHELLE ANGELA ORTIZ
Director & Producer
Michelle Angela Ortiz is a visual artist/ skilled muralist/ community arts educator/ filmmaker who uses her art as a vehicle to represent people and communities whose histories are often lost or co-opted. Through community arts practices, painting, documentaries, and public art installations, she creates a safe space for dialogue around some of the most profound issues communities and individuals may face. Her work tells stories using richly crafted and emotive imagery to claim and transform spaces into a visual affirmation that reveals the strength and spirit of the community.
For 20 years, Ortiz has designed and created over 50 large-scale public works nationally and internationally. Since 2008, Ortiz has led art for social change public art projects in Costa Rica & Ecuador and as a Cultural Envoy through the US Embassy in Fiji, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Honduras, and Cuba.
Ortiz is a 2020 Art For Justice Fund Grantee, PEW Fellow, Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellow, and a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist National Fellow. In 2016, she received the Americans for the Arts' Public Art Year in Review Award which honors outstanding public art projects in the nation.
Photo credit: Ryan Collerd
LAURA DEUTCH
Editor
Laura Deutch is a Philadelphia-based artist, educator, and cultural organizer committed to using media as a tool for social justice and community building. Her projects traverse digital and analog mediums, building relationships and connections between people, places and their stories. These projects have included interactive websites, documentaries and social interventions like a ‘Hot Tea’ cargo bike and her award winning ‘Messages in Motion’ media van. Her recent project 47 Stories was recognized by Americans for the Arts, for converting a city bus into a moving portrait of its riders. She currently works as the Education and Production Director at PhillyCAM, serves on the board of Termite TV, and holds an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University.
SALINA ALMANZAR
Lead Assistant & Facilitator’s Guide Contributor
Salina Almanzar (sah-lee-nah ahll-mun-czar)(she/her) is a Puerto Rican and Dominican artist, educator and writer. She is specifically interested in what it means to be ni de aqui y ni de alla, meaning being part of a diaspora that is between spaces and between cultures. She is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 2013 with a double major in Studio Art and English Literature. She spent about two years working in galleries and museums in Philadelphia and Lancaster City before deciding to pursue a Master's in Arts Administration in 2015. She completed the Arts Administration and Museum Leadership Graduate Program at Drexel University in June of 2017.
Photo credit: Ole Hongvanthong
CANDY ALEXANDRA GONZÁLEZ
Facilitator’s Guide Layout Editor & Collaborator
Candy Alexandra González is a Little Havana-born and raised, Philadelphia-based, multidisciplinary visual artist, poet, activist and trauma-informed educator. Currently, Candy’s artwork explores themes of body politics, fat phobia and self-healing through photography, poetry, printmaking and papermaking. Candy received their MFA in Book Arts + Printmaking from the University of the Arts in 2017. Since graduating, they have been a 40th Street Artist-in-Residence in West Philadelphia, a West Bay View Fellow at Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, NY, a Picasso Project Resident Artist at Kensington Health Sciences Academy in North Philadelphia, and a Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation Micro-Grant Recipient.