Alice dos Reis (b. 1995, Lisbon) is a visual artist and filmmaker. She has exhibited, solo and in group, at the Serralves Museum for Contemporary Art (Porto), Canal Projects (NYC), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Galerie d’Italia (Torino), EYE Film Museum (Amsterdam) Kunsthalle Lissabon (Lisbon), Lisbon Munincipal Galleries and Porto Munincipal gallery among others. Her films have been shown in various international film festivals such as Sheffield DocFest, IndieLisboa IFF and Curtas Vila do Conde IFF. In 2019, she won the Novo Banco Revelation prize for young artists, and in 2018, she won the VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize. Recently Alice was a recipient of Foundation Botin Visual Arts Grants (2022-2023), and previously, the Mondriaan Fonds Stipend for Young Artists (2020-2021). She has a Masters in Fine Art by the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and is currently pursuing a PhD degree at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. She also co-runs Pântano Books, an independent poetry press.
Maari Sugawara (b. 1994, Tokyo) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. She holds an MFA from OCAD University in Toronto and a Bachelor of Arts from Waseda University in Tokyo. Her visual works have been showcased internationally, with solo exhibitions including "Algorithms of Innocence" at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto (2022), which was featured in Nuit Blanche (2022), and "Dreams Come True Very Much" at The Garden, Toronto (2021). Her practice spans exhibitions, festivals, publications, and academic conferences. Queer methodology and speculative fiction narratives underpin her ongoing arts-based research, which focuses on uncovering both historical and personal herstories and orientations that have been forgotten—destroyed or hidden—to reorient national and cultural memory away from heteronormativity in post-WWII Japan. Incorporating XR (VR, AR), animation, photography, videography, and texts, her projects examine the interconnections between global and personal herstories, Imperial past and futures, desire and violence, while investigating the power of heteronormativity and coloniality.