Nati grew up on the island of Shaolin, also known as Staten Island, New York City — close to both the world’s largest garbage dump and the oldest continuously inhabited free Black community in the United States. She’s the child of Cuban and Colombian immigrants who landed in Queens in the late 1960s, benefited from low-cost public college and raised her with a love of learning, exploration and music. As a mami, she strives to raise a son who can resist the patriarchy to become a full human being and embrace life’s contradictions. She comes to the solidarity economy movement after a decade witnessing inequities in the music and media industry while working with diasporadical and misrepresented artists. Nati tells the stories of people resisting Capitalism and building new systems, especially those creating a culture of revolution.

Caroline Woolard is an artist who, in making her art, becomes an economic critic, social justice facilitator, media maker, and sculptor. Since the financial crisis of 2007-8, Woolard has catalyzed barter communities, minted local currencies, founded an arts-policy think tank, and created sculptural interventions in office spaces. Woolard has inspired a generation of artists who wish to create self-organized, collaborative, online platforms alongside sculptural objects and installations. Her work has been commissioned by and exhibited in major national and international museums including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and Creative Time. Woolard’s work has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS. 

She was the 2018–20 inaugural Walentas Fellow at Moore College of Art and Design and the inaugural 2019–20 Artist in Residence for INDEX at the Rose Museum, and a 2020-2021 Fellow at the Center for Cultural Innovation. Caroline Woolard is Assistant Professor at the University of Hartford, teaching in BFA and in the Nomad/9 Interdisciplinary MFA program. Woolard is the co-author of three books: Making and Being (Pioneer Works, 2019), a book for educators about interdisciplinary collaboration, co-authored with Susan Jahoda; Art, Engagement, Economy (onomatopee, 2020) a book about managing socially-engaged and public art projects; and TRADE SCHOOL: 2009-2019, a book about peer learning that Woolard catalyzed in thirty cities internationally over a decade.