Kate Keleher is a writer and teacher based in Baltimore. Her work has been featured in Best Small Fictions, Barrelhouse, Mortified, PlayGround SF, and Swamp Pink. She has taught writing with organizations including Refugee & Immigrant Transitions, Summer Ink, and Creative Healing for Youth in Pain, and as a lecturer in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, where she earned her MFA in fiction and won an Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021.
Meredith Meer is a teaching artist, illustrator, and arts educator dedicated to empowering students through creative exploration. She believes art is more than technical skill—it’s a way of thinking, observing, and expressing ideas. Inspired by the Studio Thinking framework, she creates classroom environments that function like real-world studios, where students experiment, make creative choices, and develop their unique voices.
Uasuf Gueye, of Washington, DC, is a nationally acclaimed musician and artist. He belongs to a family of Nguewel/Diali, or oral historians and musicians. He began his study and performance of Manding and Wolof music at a very young age.
Uasuf is a dynamic djembe and dundun drummer as well as a skilled instrument craftsman. He also plays the 21-key Bala, which he learned from master artists of the Manding tradition of West Africa.
Diane Y. Macklin has dedicated over two decades to the narrative arts. As a performer, teaching artist, and writer, she invests fully in the transformative nature of storytelling to explore the unique, yet universal, elements of humanity.
Terry Leonino & Greg Artzner, a.k.a. 'Magpie,' have played music together professionally for over 50 years, and have performed in countless schools all over the state of Maryland and beyond for most of those years. Their broad and deep repertoire includes numerous songs that comprise uplifting and upbeat programs on topics of history and the environment. From the Underground Railroad and the Civil War to The Great Depression and the Nineteen Sixties, history comes alive in the songs the people sang.
1983 -- Graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, Central Washington University
1983-2001 -- Employed as a Scientific Illustrator, Naval Research Laboratory
2001-2015 -- Employed as Art Director, Army Graphics, Pentagon, retired
1986-Present -- Created collaborative murals/art projects throughout the DMV including various national and international locations. Developed an art process titled Community Site Painting.
Rosemarie (MiMi Zannino) Law has been a teaching artist with the MSAC since 1989, originally as a poet-in-residence, and additionally as a living history performance artist portraying the American poet, Emily Dickinson, and the American spy, Virginia Hall in one-woman dramatic shows. She has conducted creative writing and recitation workshops with over 10,000 students and teachers throughout the State, helping them create, recite and publish original poetry as well as compete in the national Poetry Out Loud Program.
After 3 decades I’m still excited to witness how art making changes us, how a whole space can become welcoming and inspiring, how all humans, regardless of their age or socio-economic bracket , are deeply impacted by the process of creating. So I’ve led hundreds of mosaic mural installations, mural creations, taught classes, workshops, and retreats in schools, libraries, senior centers, jails, and my home. I’m an artist who explores consciousness, growing myself into a more kind human who understands we’re part of nature.
Steven Barker has been a theatre-maker and educator for the last 25+ years. He holds an MFA in Theatre for Youth from Arizona State University (ASU), and a BFA in Theatre Education and a BS in Chemistry from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).
Leslie Bumstead is a poet, writer, and teaching artist in Maryland and DC. She currently teaches creative writing workshops for incarcerated adults in several Maryland prisons, poetry to non-speaking autistic teens and young adults, and literature, composition and creative writing to teens at community art space Rhizome DC. She co-creates distance-learning arts curricula for incarcerated people with artist Carien Quiroga. Her collection of poems, Cipher/Civilian, was published by Edge Books in 2005.