Liliana Conlisk Gallegos “Mystic Machete” is a feminist, anti colonial performer of research, a translator, and an uncivil disruptor who doesn’t know her place. As an Optimus Prime Trauma Transformer con lengua de machete she exposes and confronts supremacist formats by experimenting “con lo que caiga”. Her live, interactive media art production and rasquache performances generate culturally specific, collective, technocultural creative spaces of production that reconnect Chicana/o/x Mestiza Indigenous wisdom and conocimiento to their ongoing technological and scientific contributions. As a transfronteriza (perpetual border crosser), the current limited perceptions of what research, media, and technology can be and do are like a yonke (junkyard), from which pieces are upcycled and repurposed to amplify individual and collective expression, community healing, and social justice.

Kathy Rae Huffman is a writer, producer, researcher, lecturer, prolific public speaker and a pioneering curator of video art, media art, online art, interactive art, installation and performance art. She was Chief Curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art in Long Beach, California from 1979 to 1984, where she established LBMA Video as a regional center supporting early video art. From 1984 to 1991, Huffman was Adjunct Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts and curator/producer of The Contemporary Art Television Fund. From 1991 to 1998, Huffman worked as free-lance writer, curator, lecturer, producer and consultant, based in Austria. During this time, she co-founded FACES listserv. After two years from 1998 to 2000 as an Associate Professor of Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, she was the director of Hull Time Based Arts, UK from 2000 to 2002 and the Visual Arts Director at Cornerhouse in Manchester from 2002 – 2008. Since 2008, she has curated major exhibitions for EMAF, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Transmediale and The Getty.