2022-23 National Cohort: Creative West

Latoya Cameron resides in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she is an actor and equity, diversity, and inclusion dramaturge for Salt Lake Acting Company. She has performed at various local theater companies, including: Pioneer Theatre Company, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Salt Lake Acting Company, and Plan-B Theatre Company. She has performed at the Denver Center for Performing Arts and led a new musical called Shelter: The Musical at The New York Musical Theater Festival. She has always been an advocate for representation and inclusion in her community. In 2020, she joined the staff at Salt Lake Acting Company to have a more significant impact for BIPOC and other historically excluded artists, not only within the arts organization she works for but also within the greater Utah community.

Andrea Edwards (artistically known as Drea E.) was born, bred, and educated in Seattle, Washington. She graduated Cum Laude from Seattle University earning a bachelor’s degree in photography. In college, she spent a semester abroad studying art and national identity in New Delhi, India. Post graduation, she spent a year serving in AmeriCorps at Youth Villages Inner Harbor campus, a treatment facility for youth with severe emotional and behavioral challenges. There, she led teenagers in a project linking themes of compassion, art, and service. Following her service year, Edwards participated in a six-month artist residency in Navasota, Texas, creating a body of work about Mance Lipscomb, a local black sharecropper and blues musician turned small town folk hero, contributing to Navasota being dubbed as the “Blues Capital of Texas”. In 2017, Edwards moved to Colorado to take a seasonal job as a Craft Shop Supervisor for the YMCA of the Rockies Snow Mountain Ranch. From there, she found part-time employment at Breckenridge Creative Arts, where she was quickly promoted to full-time positions as part of their programming team. She currently works as the organization’s arts education manager. In her own art practice, Edwards has shifted from photography to more interdisciplinary work. Due to the loss of her mother in February 2019, she’s recently been exploring themes of grief as handled across varying cultures, working paper as an affordable medium but also one that symbolically parallels many aspects of the human experience. Her work has been exhibited in Washington, Georgia, Texas and Colorado.

Dāna James is the associate director of alumni affairs for Berklee College of Music in Los Angeles. She joined Berklee in September 2018, transitioning from a nonprofit healthcare association, where she spearheaded data and technology strategies for six years and eventually assumed the role of information and systems specialist. A Berklee alumna, she completed her degree in performance as a vocalist and continues to work on music projects. At Berklee, James oversees alumni programming and activities in the western regions of the U.S. Outside of Berklee, she’s passionate about social equity, consuming as much film and TV content as humanly possible, and spending time with her chosen and biological families. She has a strong affinity for silver glitter.

Patricia Mareham is a parent to three children and a U.S. citizen from one of the territories of the Northern Mariana Islands, Saipan. An individual artist for more than 20 years, she has taught educational arts and crafts in schools, exhibited at community events, summits, conferences, youth summer programs, and women’s summits for three islands for Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. She loves sharing her crafts with children to give them the inspiration, patience, and passions in their creativity and to continue learning about cultural wear like the head lei, called MWAAR in Carolinian language. Mareham’s art and crafts include mwaar (head lei), lighatuttur (bead necklace), floral crafts, recycled materials, and more. Mareham believes that teaching and sharing our making and showcasing our products with our children and community brings more knowledge, interest, patience, commitments, and inspiration to future artists. Thus, it is important to promote our culture to our children and community to pass down to future generations so that this will be remembered and continued on.

A native of the Dominican Republic, Loida Maritza Pérez is the founder and executive director of AfroMundo. She is an independent scholar, cultural activist, and author of “Geographies of Home,” a novel published in the U.S. and abroad. Her upcoming book, “Beyond the Pale,” won a PEN America 2019 Jean Stein Grant for literary oral history. Her work has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Latina, MaComere, Meridians, Edinburgh Review, Bomb, Callaloo and Best of Callaloo. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from several organizations, including New York Foundation for the Arts; National Endowment for the Arts, in collaboration with University of New Mexico and Rutgers University; IC3-Institute for Communities, Creativity and Consciousness; Djerassi’s Henry Louis Gates Fellowship; Ragdale Foundation for the Arts U.S.–Africa Writer’s Project; MacDowell Arts Colony; Yaddo Foundation; Hedgebrook; Millay Arts Colony; Ucross Foundation; and Villa Montalvo. A University of New Mexico visiting scholar, she has taught creative writing at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Taos Writers’ Workshop, Bread Loaf’s Summer Institute at St. John’s College, and elsewhere. A former board member for the Albuquerque nonprofit Casa Barelas, she mentors high school students and edited Reflections on Water, an anthology of poetry, prose, and art resulting from collaborations with elementary through high school students and established artists to foster conservation and an awareness of water issues in New Mexico.

Yasmin Ruvalcaba is a Portland-based director, writer, consultant, and arts advocate. She centers her work around advancing equity, honoring mentorship and education, and promoting community outreach and engagement. Ruvalcaba is currently working at Centro Cultural as the arts and culture manager. Her time is also spent working as a teaching artist. Previously, Ruvalcaba has worked with Advance Gender Equity in the Arts (AGE) as the grants program director, and with Bag&Baggage as the Problem Play project manager, focusing on new play development and community outreach. She is also honored to be a co-founding member of Moriviví Theatre.Ruvalcaba has also engaged with her community through directing. During her time at Williams College, she directed El Nogalar and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In Portland, she has directed a Bilingual Adaption of The Tempest (Bag&Baggage Productions) and was honored to be the assistant director of La Ruta (Artists Repertory Theatre) and La Isla En Inviero/The Island in Winter (Bag&Baggage Productions). Ruvalcaba is also an active writer in the community. She was commissioned by the Portland Revels to write their 2022 spring show, and has been brought back for the 2023 show. Two of her monologues, Carmelita and Ruega Por Mi, were featured in Theatre Diaspora’s Here on This Bridge: The -ism Project. She has also had the opportunity to workshop her work with the Northwest Theatre Workshop and also premiered a Dia de los Muertos performance, EL JIMADAOR, in partnership with Bag&Baggage and Centro Cultural in 2020.