Sophia McLaughlin is a dance artist who centers her practice on the intersection of botany and dance. In her current work as a graduate student at the University of Iowa, she utilizes the knowledge of plants and the framework of botany to influence her choreography. Drawing on botanical field methodologies, her work exposes plants' inner worlds, relationships, and uniqueness by transferring the specificity of plant attributes to the specificity of the body. She sees this research as an aspect of repairing our societal disconnection from the earth by listening to and embodying plant species and their processes. She holds a BA in Dance and Botany from Connecticut College, where she worked with choreographers David Dorfman, Heidi Henderson, Lisa Race, Shawn Hove, and Ellie Goudie-Averille and botanist Chad Jones on the spread of invasive plant species. Her work has been shown at attended colleges, the 2019 ACDA New England conference, and the Sable Project’s Water in the Wood 2021 performance.

Ellen Oliver's current research explores the intersections of rock climbing and choreography. Her summer 2022 Digital Library Publishing Studio Fellowship looked at the data flow of rock climbing sequences through the Perception Neuron 3 body suit, Unreal Engine, and Isadora software. She is currently researching climbing route designs through green screen with support from the Public Digital Arts at UIowa. She was the 2020 White Mountain National Forest Artist in Residence and has spent several summers as a Young Artist in Residence at Bearnstow, Maine. Ellen has performed with several dance companies across New England, and she is a living statue at TEN31 Productions. Ellen attended University of North Carolina School of the Arts for high school and received a BA at Hampshire College in 2016 with semester research at Universidad de las Artes in Havana, Cuba.

Moon Bo Young  문보영 (poet, novelist, essayist; South Korea) made her debut in 2016, winning the Joongang New Literary Award and the Kim Soo Young Prize for her first poetry collection, translated into English in 2021 as Pillar of Books. She has since published two more volumes of poetry and several volumes of fiction and essays; beyond print, she distributes her writing through other media—snail mail, radio, phone, and more. Currently, she is teaching at the Seoul Arts University. Her participation was made possible by a grant from Arts Council Korea (ARKO).