About the presenters:

SARA ELISE is a multidisciplinary creative, splitting her time between Brooklyn and The Catskills, New York. She works primarily in the hospitality, well-being, and food industries and is the cofounder and designer of Apogeo Guest House, a boutique hotel concept space in Nicaragua that centers QTPOC, as well as the founder of Harvest & Revel, a NY-based sustainable event catering + design company.

She is the author of A Recipe for More, her debut book released with Harper Collins in May 2023.

Sara Elise has been featured in Dazed, Autostraddle, Playboy, Interview Mag, Essence, Afropunk, mindbodygreen, Bon Appetit and Healthy-ish, Well + Good, Nylon, StyleLikeU, andthem, among other publications. And was named one of BK Magazine’s 50 Most Fascinating People in 2022.

She has been invited to speak and host workshops at places like Brown University and Squarespace and has modeled for brands like Sephora, Mercedes Benz, Bombas, Instagram, MCM, AG Jeans, Madewell and more.

As an autistic Black & Indigenous femme, she spends much of her thoughtspace contemplating pleasure + pain, collective joy + healing, otherness, embodiment, remembering + reclaiming, self-destruction, and growth— and how inextricably those concepts are linked. To that end, Sara Elise has deep interests in ritualization, BDSM, relationship dynamics, and the development of decolonized personal awareness and well-being.

With all of her work, she aims to challenge our collective reality by first reimagining and then creating alternative systems and spaces for Black & Indigenous people of color and LGBTQIA2S+ people to thrive.

You can join her community-making at @SaraElise333 on Instagram, and find more of her writing at saraelise.substack.com.

KAREN SONG is a queer Korean-American filmmaker from New York with a background in theater, photography and music videos. Projects she is in the process of writing include a narrative short about a queer surf community, “Seoul on Fire”—a scripted episodic set in Korea, and other scripted narrative features which firmly center and make visible women, queer and diverse communities. She is in post-production on “Sundays at Café Tabac,” a feature documentary she is directing and producing about ‘90s lesbian nightlife, media visibility, and activism told through the lens of the legendary eponymous party in NYC’s East Village, and is its podcast co-host. She is an avid surfer and is a contributing host of Swell Season Surf Radio podcast.

She has also directed and produced various short form projects including branded content, documentaries, music videos, experimental shorts and commercials on-location around the globe and in-studio. Clients and collaborators include American Express, Mini Cooper, VICE Media, Meshell Ndegeocello, The LOFT LGBTQ+Center, LA LGBTQ+Center, Aubin Pictures, Red Bull Media, Disney Channel, Momentum Agency, Equinox Fitness, Tonal Fitness, Verizon, Genius Media and many others.