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Meet our Festival Guest Artists

Our festival features San Diego-based QTBIPOC artists, wellness advocates, and healers who inspire the work we do here at Soultry Sisters Arts + Wellness Collective. They will lead arts and wellness workshops, performances, culinary features, and art installations centered around creative expression,
collective healing, and mindful movement.
This year we are asking each guest artist to create an offering or activation
in response to our festival theme, Healing Nature of PLAY. 


Melissa Barayang
Sunny Soto-Briscoe
Nicole Damiba
Kelsey O. Daniels
Ciara Dominique
Alyssa "Ajay" Junious
Toni Lynn Junious

Che Che Luna
Theena Nguyen
Ianne Rivera
BJ Robinson

Katie Ruiz
Emm Ruiz
Frankie Simone

Workshop Descriptions

Learn more about our workshops!

Our festival includes arts + wellness workshops centered around creative expression, collective healing, and mindful movement. We asked each guest artist to create a session in response to what "Healing Nature of PLAY" means to them. We are excited to feature QTBIPOC artists, wellness advocates, and healers who inspire the work we do here at Soultry Sisters Arts + Wellness Collective.

Saturday Workshops

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"Exploring the healing nature of PLAY" • Soultry Sisters (Ajay & Toni Lynn Junious)  •  Saturday • 10:30am-11:30am

“As we search for pathways to a liberated future, PLAY is a vital practice.” - Soultry Sisters

 

Play is natural and connects us to our humanity. It has roots in being a pathway to reclaiming our collective liberation. Play is different for all of us. There is no right or wrong way to play. Whatever it is, it often helps us relax, invites us to be curious, and find our flow. It’s an opportunity to explore new ideas and tap into our imagination.

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What does "Healing Nature of PLAY" mean to you? In this workshop, we will discuss the origins of play and reflect on what it means to cultivate and create a personal play practice. – how play intersects with our relationship to one another, to community, to the land/Earth Mama, and to self. This session is a space for us to connect to our earliest memories of play, create a play book of inspiration, and explore a play practice together.

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“Wild & Sacred Play” • Makhosi Foundation (Nicole Damiba)

Saturday • 11:45am-12:45pm

A dedicated space for PLAY - offering intentional ways to story-tell about the trickster energy, act out emotions + ancestral cosmologies, move through interactive communal activities to break the inner and outer ice

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"Doorway to the Imaginal Realm" • Kwentuhan (Melissa Barayang)

Saturday • 2:30pm-3:30pm

In workshop, Mel will be guiding folks through the process of tapping into their mythic imagination. The belief in mythology is that everyone has a gift to offer and contribute to the collective. My hope is that in these devastating times of crisis, we might find ways to remember how the mythic stories of our ancestors were once used as maps for survival and can guide us on how we might resist empire today.

By connecting with these stories, we can begin to tap into the beauty and the grief, enchantment, and ecological wisdom that they hold and develop a capacity to imagine new possibilities for the future.

This workshop will include grounding, active imagination practice, and writing prompts to uncover your unique mythic story within the collective.

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Important Reminder: This offering will not be held in a clinical capacity. However, care is available <3 Liberatory Wellness Network Mango Tree Counseling Axis Mundi Center for Mental HealthS uicide and Crisis Lifeline: 988 Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255 Domestic Violence Hotline: 888-385-4657 Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741

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"Embracing the Pleasures of Imperfection" • Che Che Luna

Saturday • 3:45pm - 4:45pm

A sensual movement workshop to unlearn perfectionism and return to the liberatory and connective power of play. In this container, we will wiggle, giggle, feel and shape-shift. We will observe where internalized perfectionism has been creating stuckness in our bodies, and we will bolster each other's courage to lean into the glorious gift of messiness and authenticity.

Sunday Workshops

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"Lullabies of Liberation" • Ianne Rivera

Sunday • 11:30pm - 12:30pm 

Rest is the sacred act of softening.  A yielding of the body to a space of receptivity where dreams and reality blur lines so we may play in the infinite possibility of our Divinity.  Through the use of song, sound, and sacred storytelling, “Lullabies of Liberation” will draw your mind and body into a harmonious state of rest.  Here you’ll be guided to imagine and play as you allow your dreamscape to become a lived experience.  As a community we’ll reflect on our dance within the imagination through artistic expression and communal sharing.

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"SOULscape: a movement playground" • Soultry Sisters (Ajay & Toni Lynn Junious)  •  Sunday • 12:45-1:45pm

“As we search for pathways to a liberated future, PLAY is a vital practice.” - Soultry Sisters

Play is natural and connects us to our humanity. It has roots in being a pathway to reclaiming our collective liberation. Play looks different for everyone. There is no right or wrong way to play. Whether it helps us relax, sparks curiosity, or invites us into flow, play opens the door to explore imagination, joy, and healing.

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SOULscape is a guided movement experience rooted in play, expression, and embodiment. Together, we’ll journey through playful movement and breathwork, using visualization and somatic practices to reconnect with our bodies and creative spirit. This is a soft space to come home to yourself, to find freedom through self-expression, and to explore what liberation feels like in your body.

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This session fosters a sense of belonging and creative flourishing—inviting you to connect with others while tapping into your own unique creative playground.

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"Simple Songs: Mantra Melodies & Musical Mad Libs" • El Studio del BJ (BJ Robinson)  • Sunday • 2:00pm - 3:00pm

Songwriting can warm your funny bone and soothe your soul! In this workshop, participants will play with words and sounds to create songs that can impact your everyday life as easy tools for comfort & consolation, as well as energy & inspiration!

Learn more about our
Community Mixer guest artists

Our festival will have 2 community mixers that include an art installation, live performances, music, food, local vendors, and dancing. The mixer is a great opportunity to connect with other festival participants & guest artists. We love creating opportunities for folks in our community to socialize &
make meaningful connections with one another.  

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 Katie & Emm Ruiz •

Festival Art Installation


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 Live Performance • Frankie Simone

Opening Mixer

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Ciara Dominique • PLAY Station:

The Silent Disc0 & Closing Ceremony DJ

The Silent Disc0 is a San Diego based sensory experience that allows for attendees to curate a one of a kind experience. With 3 music channels and headphones capable of tuning into them all, YOU can play DJ and give yourself the night out you've always wanted!

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Theena Nguyen • PLAY station: "Whim & Watercolor"

Let your inner artist play! In this lighthearted watercolor station, you’ll be gently guided through the basics of watercolor painting—then encouraged to toss perfectionism aside and let your brush follow the flow. Choose your own canvas, follow your curiosity, and create a one-of-a-kind masterpiece to take home. No pressure, just puddles, color, and a little bit of whimsy.

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 Live Performance • Kelsey O. Daniels

Closing Celebration Mixer

Kelsey O. Daniels will open the closing ceremony with a 30-minute performance engagement designed to guide participants into a collective dreamspace. Blending spoken word, breathwork, sonic invocation, and ritual storytelling, they will create a soft landing where imagination becomes sacred practice. With their signature mix of spiritual depth and playful ease, Kelsey will lead the room into reflection, release, and renewal—honoring the wisdom stirred throughout the festival. This will not be just a performance, but a portal. Attendees will be invited to arrive as they are, carrying what they’ve gathered, and step into a shared field of dreaming.

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Culinary Artist • Sunny Soto-Briscoe

Opening Mixer, Saturday Lunch &

Closing Celebration Mixer

Artists Bio

Learn more about our guest artists!

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Live Performance

Day 1: Opening Community Mixer

Frankie Simone (they/them) | queer, gender expansive, afro-indigenous pop artist

@iamfrankiesimone

Frankie Simone (they/them) is a queer, gender expansive, Puerto Rican pop artist that puts on uplifting, unapologetic and empowering shows. Centering play, pleasure and tapping into ancestral wisdom, Simone’s songs touch on themes of self love, healing, community and liberation. Amidst these magnetic soundscapes, they create cathartic and sacred space for us to commune, dance, sing and remember our innate worthiness, power and joy.

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Festival DJ

Day 1: PLAY station "Silent Disc0"

Day 3: Closing Celebration Mixer DJ

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Ciara Dominique (she/her) | DJ

@ciaraaathisbeatis @thesilentdisc0

Ciara Dominique is a creative multi-disciplinarian who wields the weapon of storytelling through various mediums to convey it's connection to our liberation. Alternating between the worlds of Filmmaking, Writing, DJing, and Event Curation to best highlight how intertwined the arts are to the healing and expression of self.

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Day 1: Community Mixer

Festival PLAY station "Whim & Watercolor"

Theena Nguyen (She/her) | Multidisciplinary Artist

@Papayamoonart

Theena was a naturally creative child drawn to color, texture, and imagination, but like many, she was encouraged to take a more traditional path—earning a business degree and building a career far from the arts. It wasn’t until 2019 that a shift created space for something new, or rather, something old: curiosity. What began as a playful experiment with watercolor quickly rekindled a long-lost spark.Since then, she’s embraced a multidisciplinary journey, exploring painting, ceramics, and a range of subjects from botanicals and landscapes to whimsical pet portraits. Her art is rooted in rediscovery, joy, and the quiet beauty found in everyday moments.

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Culinary Artist

Community Mixers & Day 2 Lunch

Sunny Soto-Briscoe (she/they) | Founder & head chef of Sunny Street Outreach

@sunnystreetoutreachmvmt

Sunny Soto-Briscoe, founder & head chef of Sunny Street Outreach, a grassroots organization that focuses in providing nutritious meals for our houseless community. 

They create businesses like a catering company and mobile mocktail bar to be self-sustainable in their community missions to advocate for our underserved neighbors. Community, Hospitality, and compassion lead their mission.

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Day 2 & 3: Arts & Wellness Workshops

Toni Lynn Junious (she/her) | Healing Artist, Arts & Wellness Curator, Researcher

@toniiilynnn

Toni Lynn Junious (she/her) is a healing artist, arts & wellness curator, and women's health researcher that merges public health and holistic practices to promote wellness as liberation. She blends health equity, sexual and reproductive justice, and empowerment to address the root causes of dis-ease and promote healing from the inside out. Toni graduated from University of California, Irvine with a Bachelor of Arts in Public Health and Global Cultures. She received her Masters of Public Health from George Washington University, and is also a certified yoga teacher, community herbalist, and full spectrum doula. Through Soultry Sisters, she curates soulcare rituals and nurturing spaces to cultivate community, foster belonging & tap into ancestral practices.

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Day 2 & 3: Arts & Wellness Workshops

Alyssa "Ajay" Junious (she/her) | Artist,  Movement Educator, Choreographer

@continuum.sd

Alyssa “Ajay” Junious (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, wellness practitioner passionate about making art accessible to all. As a socially conscious artist, she uses art to process and create conversation around social change in her community. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Performance, Choreography, and Certificate of Arts Management from the University of California, Irvine. In 2018, she founded Continuum Arts & Pilates where she independently produces community performances, artist development programs, and movement workshops. Through Soultry Sisters, she empowers her community to use creative expression practices to improve their social, emotional and mental health.

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​Day 2: Arts & Wellness Workshops

Melissa Barayang (she/her) | Mythologist

@kwentuhan_ and @acertainsoftness

Mel is a mythologist exploring storytelling and ritual, guiding others in reclaiming personal and ancestral mythologies. Mel’s work centers beauty, enchantment and imagination as forms of resistance, inviting tenderness, reverence, and embodied intergenerational wisdom.While her professional work will sit formally at the intersection of Mythology and Depth Psychology, it is most importantly always spiritually rooted in the pre-colonial, revolutionary, animist practices of her Filipino ancestral lineage and inspired by the Babaylan spirit.

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Day 2: Arts & Wellness Workshops

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Nicole Damiba (she/her) | Makhosi Foundation

@makhosi_org

Makhosi Foundation is a transformative space where ancestral healing arts and cultural traditions enrich communities. Ubungoma, our traditional lineage stems from the southern bantu people of Africa. By engaging in Afro-indigenous practices, we intuitively guide one another to reclaim our cultural wisdom, cultivating a sovereign sense of self and deep reverence for life, community, and land. Together, we journey towards a future rooted in liberation and togetherness.Led by black, diasporic ceremonialists…Gogo Ekhaya and Gogo Thule underwent a form of cultural reclaimation through an African-Indigenous initiation to transform into iSangoma: traditional healers carrying the wisdom of their elders and ancestors.Gogo means grandmother in zulu, which identifies one as a carrier of ancestral wisdom with the ability to guide and provide remedies of well-being.

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Day 2: Arts & Wellness Workshops

Che Che Luna (they/them) | Movement Storyteller, (Eco)erotic Artist, Certified Sexuality Educator and sensual Embodiment Facilitator

@che.che.luna

Che Che Luna (they/them) is a (eco)erotic artmaker, movement storyteller and sex educator dedicated to collaborative liberatory praxis. Their lens as a queer, trans, Autistic Chicanx informs their multidisciplinary creations. It is their honor and life's work to support humans in reclaiming the body as a source of pleasure, elemental wisdom, expansion, transformation, erotic aliveness, autonomy, interconnectedness, and love. Luna evokes permission for others to live into their truth, heal from systemic oppression, embody their desires, and find their own access points into the sensual body and the collective interdependent body of the more-than-human world. You can find more of their work on IG @che.che.luna and join their newsletter here: https://che-che-luna.myflodesk.com/newsletter

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Photo credit: Nykelle DeVivo (@nykelle_devivo)

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Day 3: Arts & Wellness Workshops

Ianne Celeste Rivera (she/her) | Research Scientist & Embodiment Composer

@one_thread_rituals

As an Embodiment Composer, Ianne (she/her) unites 16 years in Cancer research and 10 years in the healing arts to the creation of Sonic Rituals®.  Inspired by her Mexican culture, R&B,  natural soundscapes, guided visualization, and spoken word, Ianne is a sound healer who creates sensual rituals + ceremonies to embrace the body for emotional wellness, self-actualization, and pleasure liberation.  She creates digital spaces of exploration as the host of the podcast Pleasure Revolution and creator of the first World Pleasure Day on August 18th.

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Day 3: Closing Ceremony Performance

Kelsey O. Daniels (she/they) |

Black Dream Experiment/Big Dream Energy

@AndShesHere_

Kelsey O. Daniels is an artist organizer baddie scholar from Southeast San Diego. Their work centers on storytelling, world building, and dreamwork as tools for liberation. As a fat Black queer disabled femme, Kelsey honors her ancestors and descendants by revoking consent from the failed experiment of white supremacy & dreaming up worlds that are affirming and lit. Through poetry, performance, and mixed media, they explore themes of identity, imagination, and ancestral memory, inviting audiences to engage in active relationship with themselves and their communities. She curates a creative universe called Black Dream Experiment that explores Black dreaming as a collective ancestral, wellness, and liberation practice. When Kelsey is not moving in her public roles she enjoys going to the beach, cackling until her sides hurt & listening to her comfort playlists.

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Connect and Learn More at Kelseyshere.com

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Festival Art Installation

Katie Ruiz (she/her) | Mixed Media Artist & Activist

@thepompomprojectorg

Katie Ruiz (she/her) is a Chicana artist working in painting and mixed media textile art. Her work is colorful and tactile. She is a community leader who uses her art to bring people together. Ruiz holds a Masters of Fine art from the New York Studio School.

 

Katie Ruiz's Pompom Project engages the community in a collaborative creative process. The experience of coming together to create with ones hands and working toward a shared goal promotes investment and pride in the community and shared space.

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Day 3: Arts & Wellness Workshops

BJ Robinson (They/He) | Founder of Studio Del BJ, Arts Educator, Music Director, and Composer

@willbjrob

WILLIAM BJ ROBINSON, He/They, is an adopted Black, Puerto Rican, and White queer international arts educator, music director, and composer. BJ moved from New Jersey to San Diego in 2009, and they've worked throughout San Diego, with churches & schools to non-profits & professional companies. They founded their private arts studio, El Studio del BJ, in 2015, which offers services from voice coaching and audition prep to music reading and songwriting. Recent performance credits include their original one-person show, 'The Pandemusical Diaries', 'Notes on Killing Seven Oversight Management & Economic Stability Board Members' at Moxie Theatre, and 'Twelfth Night of the Living Dead, or What You Kill' with Loud Fridge Theatre Group. Musical Direction credits include 'I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change' at Vanguard Theatre & 'Seussical Jr.' at Scripps Theatre Arts. Currently, BJ is Director of Music at Christ United Presbyterian Church, Creator/Host of Tough Talk, and Host of 'KPBS/Arts' on KPBS.

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Festival Art Installation

Emm Ruiz  (She/Her) | Chicana artist, professional sign painter, and muralist

@spaceyelfsigns

Emm Ruiz is a Chicana artist, professional sign painter, and muralist working in the music festival industry. Her multidisciplinary work includes hand-painted signage, large-scale murals, and collaborative installations created for events such as Lightning in a Bottle and Same Same But Different. Ruiz holds a Certificate of Achievement in Graphic Design from MiraCosta College and brings a strong sense of color, precision, and craftsmanship to every aspect of her creative practice.

Learn more about our
Media Team

We have an amazing Media Team who are
capturing all the special moments during the festival weekend.

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Festival Videographer & Photographer 

Pauline Scully (she/her) | Filmmaker & Photographer

@pauline.scully  @noendsmedia

Pauline Scully is your friendly neighborhood director and storyteller. She has a deep appreciation for how a compelling story can make someone aware of their experience and emotions. She believes that communication through narratives has the power to initiate change and shift perspectives. 

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Festival Social Media Manager

Astrid Gonzales (she/her) | Filmmaker & Visual Artist

@theastridnaut

Astrid Gonzales is a filmmaker and visual artist from Encinitas, CA. Astrid attended UC Berkeley and received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies & Film Studies and a Film Production Certificate from the UCLA Theater Film & Television Film Production program. Her video art and film focus on memory, language, and community. Astrid’s work is committed to sharing stories that center marginalized communities across genres and visual forms. Currently, she is the social media manager, videographer, and editor for The Hill Street Country Club, a non-institutional, community-centered art gallery and space in Oceanside, and is committed to continuing to increase accessibility to the arts and arts education in North County San Diego as part of the Hill Street community and artist. 

Learn more about our
Coordinator Team

We have an amazing team of Festival Coordinators who are
providing support during the festival weekend.

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Festival Coordinator: Artists

Analicia Barros (she/her) | User Experience Designer

@Analicia_b

Analicia Barros is a San Diego based User Experience designer specializing in, user-centered design research, public safety, communication technology, and social and environmental issues. Her work focuses on creating intuitive, impactful solutions that address real-world challenges.

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Festival Coordinator: Vendors

Theena Nguyen (she/her)

@papayamoonart

Born in Vietnam, Theena immigrated with her family to Southern California at the age of six. In 2006, she moved to San Diego for college and has since called it home. Balancing a successful career in legal real estate with her artistic passions, she finds solace in painting and pottery. Her art usually reflects the natural world with subjects such as clouds, fruits, flowers and people. Beyond her creative endeavors, Theena loves visiting new places, thrifting, sharing food with family and friends, camping and most of all, spotting fruit trees and picking them.

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Festival Coordinator: Volunteers

Margaret Salazar (she/her)

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