Aviva Alter is the mistress of embroidered machinations, more on that later…

Alan Lerner received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has taught at the Art Institute and at Lill Street Art Center in the Ceramics Department. After a long career in decorative ceramics, he is pursuing his interests in screenprinting and sculpture in mixed media. As a musician, he is performing with various local bands.

After Adam Rust earned his Bachelor of Science in Art from the University of Wisconsin, he moved to Chicago where he received his Master of Fine Art from Columbia College, Chicago. In addition to creating object and installation art, Adam is a cartoonist, writer and illustrator for publications like Mad Magazine and Hustler Magazine. His Comic Strip ‘Adam’s Rust’ has been featured in dozens of periodicals, websites, books, and other mass media over the last 10 years, and can be viewed at www.adamsrust.com. Adam currently lives on the North Side of Chicago with his fiancée and cat. He works fulltime as a carpenter and cartoonist, peppered with periodic stints of teaching and weirdo art projects.

Poet, translator, and new media artist Francesco Levato is the executive director of The Poetry Center of Chicago. He is the author of Marginal State, a collection of poetry, and his work has been published internationally in journals and anthologies, both in print and online, including Drunken Boat, The Progressive, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, Versal, and many others. His poetry-based video artwork has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. More can be found at francescolevato.com or facebook.com/francesco.a.levato.

Lauren Levato, red-haired descendant of Vikings, was raised by a pack of wolves. She is also a classically trained artist. She is obsessed with insects and is interested in other natural curiosities, like humans for example. Her paintings and 3D insect assemblages are featured as book covers and in many anthologies. She has exhibited internationally and, at present, has more than 100 insect species in her studio. In addition to her art and exhibitions, Lauren has been working with Chicago galleries as a curator and director since 1997. Currently she is an independent curator. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Marriage Bones (Fractal Edge Press, 2006) and at the hotel andromeda, a text/visual collaboration with Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press, 2007). Levato holds degrees in Professional Writing and Women’s Studies from Purdue and in Political Journalism from Georgetown University. For more visit laurenlevato.com.

Joshua W. Cotter spent his salad days hunting leviathan,  the mighty sperm whale of the deepest, darkest, whaley waters of the general mid-southern blueyblue roundabouts part of the Pacific OCEAN.  Spent and old, Joshua now peters his days away with ‘graphic novels’ and ’sequential literature’, the world’s foremost and only sequential scrimshander.  Read his latest scrimshandered epic, ‘Skyscrapers of the Midwest’.  IF YOU WANT TO.  (Curator’s note: Seeing as how Josh is so spent and old he can’t remember to tell you the important bits so the duty falls to me: He is a two-time Eisner nominee for his ‘sequential literature’ and really neat-o places like Nickelodeon call him for his freakish ramblings, otherwise called ‘ideas’.)

Multimedia artist, feminist activist, and linguophile Skye Enyeart currently freelances as an arts & languages instructor and arts programming developer in Chicago, Illinois. Skye is a graduate of Columbia College of Chicago’s M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts and has attended numerous universities in Paris, France, including: IES, the Sorbonne, The School of the Louvre, and Spéos Photography. Her B.A. from Purdue is in International Relations, and she speaks French, Italian, and Mandarin. Skye is a firm believer in the power of self-expression and is a visual artist who started in photography and has increased her interests to a variety of media including installation, metalwork, and textiles. Her steadfast dream is creating humanitarian photo documentaries.

Susan Aurinko, a photographer and curator, has shown her work in France, Italy, and India, as well as in the US. Her 35 image exhibition about India, entitled STILL POINT, INDIA, will open at Kriti Gallery in Varanasi, in the fall of 2009, and will tour India for one and a half to two years, sponsored by HP.  Last year, the proposed cover image for the book of the same name won both a jury honorable mention and a Public Choice 2nd Prize from PX3.

Aurinko’s work appears on several book covers, one of which recently won Best Anthology in the 2009 Independent Press Awards (IPPY), and four of her photographs are included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s permanent collection.  In addition, many of her images hang in corporate and private collections in France, Italy, Monaco, the UK, and across the US. Her photography can be seen at www.aurinkophoto.com.  Aurinko is on the Advisory Committee of the International Photography Awards, and the jury of the Lucie Awards, which are held at Lincoln Center each October, and also served on the jury of PX3 (Paris) for the 2009 awards.

Chris Hefner was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan & has been living and working in Chicago for the past 7 years.  His work with film, sculpture, print, installation and sound has been shown in such venues as Chicago Underground Film Festival, And/Or Gallery Dallas, Lausanne Underground Film Festival, Flicker Film Fest, UndergroundfilmMaker Fest San Francisco, the Center for Book & Paper.  His two multimedia solo exhibitions, “Birdcatcher” (2006) & “Expo” (2008) were held at Heaven and Finch Galleries, respectively.  Hefner is currently in production of his first feature-length film called “The Pink Hotel”, slated for completion in early 2010.