Steven Baboun is an artist, photographer, and creative director from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, based in New York City. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Film and Media Arts and a minor in Education Studies from American University, as well as an MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design.
Baboun works in video, photography, performance, textile, and multimedia installation, and design. He is the founder and creative director of Studio Baboun, a creative house based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the co-founder and CEO of NativRoots Collective, a creative agency specializing in visual production and solutions.
Additionally, he performs under the digital persona Marie-Claude, a Haitian comedic character developed during the height of the pandemic. Marie-Claude aims to connect with the Haitian community through humor and positivity, as well as highlight critical social issues in the community through comedy.
Zach Oren is an immigrant, queer photographer based in LA. He is a self-taught artist and loves taking portraits in natural light, where documentary meets editorial. Using his own intersectionality — queer, poz, feminist, Middle Eastern — his intent and (literal) focus is to highlight the immense and diverse beauty in underrepresented voices that are too often overlooked. Zach’s portraits have been exhibited all over the US and shown in several publications.
Laurence Philomene is a non-binary artist from Montreal who creates colourful images and video work informed by their lived experiences as a chronically ill transgender person. Their practice celebrates trans existence and studies identity as a space in constant flux via highly-saturated, cinematic, and vulnerable images.
Gaining an interest in image-making in their teenage years, Laurence has since used photography and video as space to both experiment with, and document identity as it comes to be expressed through gender. Using the camera as a process of mutual [and self] care, their work aims to humanize identities that have been historically marginalized, and act as a love letter to their community.
Laurence’s first monograph Puberty — in which the artist self-documents two years of their life as they undergo hormonal replacement therapy — is currently available via Yoffy Press.
