Meet the Pay It Forward artist cohort

Aria “Lune” Acevedo (she/they) is a detribalized Indigenous Latine actor, designer, writer, and educator from the San Antonio area. Her work focuses on the importance of honest and authentic intersectional representation of the Latine experience. Aria is specifically interested in exploring the Mexican-American and detribalized experience, the Queer identity, and life with mental illness and disabilities. Her writing explores and combines different mediums of storytelling and ritual. She is currently based in Western Massachusetts, and holds a BA in Theater and Creative Writing from Hampshire College and an MA in Teaching for Middle and High School Theater and Special Education from Mount Holyoke College.

Aria is this year’s resident playwright for Play Incubation Collective where she will be developing her play Return to Abya Yala. The play focuses on identity within the Indigenous community. It follows the journey of Xo who is detribalized and seeking reconnection to roots lost from centuries of colonization and generations of assimilation that carry trauma into the future. This future may look to the settler’s eye like an apocalyptic dystopia, but for Indigenous peoples, it could be the time to finally regain stewardship of the land and heal.

With his unique blend of comedy, magic, 80s pop culture references, silly puppets, amazing illusions and hysterical audience participation, Scotty Swan keeps his audiences laughing. His family magic show will have you not only amazed at the magic but probably up on stage laughing with him (or at him!) The totally rad magic show is one of the coolest magic shows out there! Besides being an accomplished producer, prop builder, performer and puppet designer, Scotty has devoted much time to teaching young people the art of puppetry and magic as a means of self expression, and has been an advocate of integrating the performing arts into the public school curriculum.

Kim Chin-Gibbons is a Cambodian born, American raised musician & photographer spending her time making art in Western Massachusetts, Boston, MA, and Woonsocket, RI. Leaving high school at age fourteen led her to find her love of music, photography, and marketing for the arts and nonprofits. Kim is an alum of North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens, and the Institute for the Musical Arts’ summer programs (performance and recording). After attending Marlboro College and the Marlboro Institute at Emerson College, she left school to pursue Music with the progressive rock band Sunset Mission. The band has grown into an 8-piece lineup and plans to tour across the country and beyond, as soon COVID circumstances permit.

Sunset Mission is an eight-piece progressive rock band based in Boston, MA. The band, which originally included Dana Goodwin, Jan Schwartz, Jessica Gray, and Cam Roux, formed out of the remains of the local Boston-based band Conundrum Nine in 2016 and released their debut full-length album, “Journey To Lunar Castellum” in December of 2019.

Because Sunset Mission’s progressive sound required more instruments than the straightforward funk-rock of Conundrum Nine, Dana and Jan decided to expand the band’s live line-up, and the band now includes Dana on drums, keyboard and vocals, Jan on guitar, Colin Stevens on guitar, Kim Chin-Gibbons on guitar and vocals, Douglas Appleman on keyboard and vocals, Jesse Mattison on keyboard and vocals, Lilah Asbornsen on vocals, and Nate Porter on bass.

Ebbie, a U.S.-born Black queer femme, is a self-taught artist whose writing, choreography and visual art is heavily rooted in African diasporic movements, belief in time travel, and exploration of how dance can address, heal, and honor intergenerational trauma and chronic illness. Ebbie’s mediums of focus include speculative memoir writing and poetry and hand-cut mixed media collages. They recently joined the QTBIPOC-led Neighborhood Grow Plan / Neighborhood Culture Plan to help design popular education zines with young people and community members in and around Holyoke, MA. Ebbie is passionate about care network building and food sovereignty.