Mike Che is the City of West Hollywood’s Arts Coordinator. He spearheaded the program design and launch of the City’s Transgender Arts Initiative grant, the only grant of its kind in the country. He also manages the City’s One City One Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival, a 40-day long celebration of the LGBTQ community through the arts. He is currently a member of the ONE Archives Culture Series Advisory Committee; the LA County Department of Arts and Culture’s Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative Advisory Committee; and AftA’s Arts and Culture Leaders of Color Steering Committee.

Websites: www.weho.org/arts, www.weho.org/pride

Social Media

Twitter: @wehoarts  

Instagram: @wehoarts

Facebook: @wehoarts  

Brian Sonia-Wallace is the founder and convener of #PridePoets, started in conjunction with the City of West Hollywood’s One City One Pride initiative, and grown from Brian’s business RENT Poet, which brings poets on typewriters to events to write custom poems. Brian has written for tech companies and governments, toured nationally and internationally, and been the Writer-in-Residence for everyone from the Mall of America to Amtrak to the Boston Harbor Islands. His first book of essays, Dust Bowl Nation, tracks his journey to find humanity at the margins of America through poetry, and is forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2020. Brian lives in Los Angeles, and believes that typewriter poetry is inherently queer, blurring the lines between public and private, intimacy and stranger, permanence and ephemerality.

Websites: rentpoet.com and pridepoets.com

Social Media

Instagram: @rentpoet and @pridepoets 

Twitter:@rentpoet and @pridepoets

The self-given name Yozmit means 'myth about one’s self' : Through her ritualistic performance art, Yozmit combines theater, dance, pop culture, fashion, gender identity, mythology, and shamanism onto a single canvas. She is currently working on DoYou project - an awareness-based performance art campaign. DoYou means 'Do'ing 'You' – a process of becoming fully self-realized and acting upon by balancing the Sacred Feminine and The Sacred Masculine, using gender and identity as a subject.

Yozmit is a international headliner at The Box in New York City and London. She has shown her work at Hollywood Fringe Festival, One City One Pride Arts Festival, Coachella Music Festival, Burning Man, Lucent Dossier, Joyce Soho, Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/ CalArts Theater), Movement Research at The Judson Church, St. Marks Church, Lincoln Center, Art Basel, ChunCheon International Mime Festival, Life Ball, Doma International Art Festival, Joe's Pub, Santos Party House, Galapagos Art Space, Dixon Place, Supper Club, Webster Hall, Sleep No More, Hotel Americano, Standard Hotel, Mondrian Hotel and various other venues in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, London, Paris, Ibiza, Berlin, Vienna, Sofia and Seoul. In 2010, Yozmit performed in Marina Abramović’s “The Artist is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NYC. 

Website: http://www.yozmit.com/

Instagram: @Yozmit

YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/yozmitube