Jaguar Mary/Jocelyn Taylor is a performance artist, glossolalia vocalist, filmmaker, and hoop dancer. Her specific concerns, and the directives that have driven her art practice, engage black feminist discourse, questions of history, and now, ritual performance and practice in art as tools to help us out of our world crisis. Jaguar Mary née Jocelyn Taylor was a founding member of the queer video artist collective, House of Color. In 1990, she co-founded the Clit Club with Julie Tolentino, a dance party focused on infusing identity politics with sex-positive lesbian visibility. Taylor is an alumni of the prestigious Whitney Independent Study Program. Her first gallery show, Alien at Rest, a video installation in which the artist asserts her humanity while walking nude through the streets of New York, opened at Deitch Projects-Soho in 1996. Her films and video installations have been featured in exhibitions at MoMA, the New Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her video pieces and installations have shown in the Johannesburg and Havana Biennials, and gallery spaces in Venezuela, Canada, France, and the Netherlands. Jaguar Mary has had the pleasure of collaborating with feminist artists Annie Sprinkle, Yvonne Rainer, and Cheryl Dunye. Her essay, “Testimony of a Naked Woman,” was included in Afrekete: An anthology of Black Lesbian Writing (1995) edited by Catherine McKinely and Joyce Delaney. Jaguar Mary has an MFA in Film and Video from California Institute for the Arts. She is currently completing an MFA in Performance and Performance Studies as a member of its inaugural cohort at Pratt Institute.

Cauleen Smith (b. 1967, Riverside, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions. Studio Museum of Harlem, Houston Contemporary Art Museum; Yerba Buena Center for Art, and the New Museum, New York, D21 Leipzig and Decad, Berlin. She has had solo shows for her films and installations at The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Threewalls, Chicago. She shows her drawings and 2D work with Corbett vs. Dempsey. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film /Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chicago Expo Artadia Award, and Rauschenberg Residency. Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. She joined the School of Art faculty at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2017.

Ayana U'Dongo is a self-trained, experimental video artist that utilizes the medium to heal herself and others. She believes in the power of positive, audacious dreams and everyone’s right to fulfill them. Healing is a connective process that requires the engagement of present-thinking, higher power vision, invincible courage, and fearless vulnerability; skills she has developed over the decades for self-actualization and personal growth. In 1991 U'Dongo began researching and working with video as a staff at Video Data Bank, Chicago. There U'Dongo consumed all things video art and was influenced by the diaristic and narrative styles of George Kuchar, Marlon Riggs, Thomas Harris, Sadie Benning, and Jocelyn Taylor (included in the exhibition). Her exploration of sexuality, gender, and cultural identity are designed to provoke, explore, and celebrate the power of diversity, inclusion, freedom, and sacrifice.

Jackie Clay is the Executive Director at the Coleman Center for the Arts in rural west Alabama. A graduate of California College of the Arts with dual-interdisciplinary degrees, her intellectual practice centers on black visual culture. She writes and researches performance and video, particularly work by women from the late 1960s to 1990s.

Dirty Looks is a bi-coastal platform for queer film, video and performance. A roaming screening series, DL is designed to trace contemporary queer aesthetics through historical works, presenting quintessential LGBTQ time-based art alongside up-and-coming artists and filmmakers. Over the course of seven years, Dirty Looks has staged screening and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art; The Kitchen, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Participant Inc, New York; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City; White Columns, New York; ONE Archives, Los Angeles; Artists Space, New York; Atelier397, São Paulo; and Judson Memorial Church, New York. DL began regular Los Angeles programming in January 2015, instating a national reach for these programs and will bring Dirty Looks: On Location, a 31-day series of interventions in queer city spaces to Los Angeles in July 2018.