Shaunnah Ysabel Cledera (b. Camarines Sur) lives and works in Los Banos. Her current practice as an independent publisher, researcher, and critic is centered on collaborative practices in zine production and independent publishing, cultural production under the Duterte and Marcos regime, and archiving and memory-making in the intersections of digital media, oral, and print culture. She is a founding member of critical collective Magpies Press and is also a founding editor of The Basement, a nonprofit independent platform for conversations on culture. Currently, she is writing her master's thesis on Bikol metrical romances (1920s-60s). For the institute, she'll be sharing a project with Magpies Press called We Remember, a global library-community that is hoped to activate repositories documenting the 1972 Martial Law and critically surface its continuities with the Duterte and Marcos, Jr. regimes in the particular presents of communities here and abroad by encouraging their contribution to sustain the production of community counter-memory. It is a project hoped to tap into self- and community-produced work like zines, flyers and placards and its easy collection, reproduction, and emulation to foster multiple, communally built and kept, at once digital and mobile physical library spaces to reconfigure the “we” under attack and find communities with similar struggles outside our zones of physical and geopolitical comfort. 

R. Benedito Ferrão has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, N. America, and Oceania. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary. Additionally, he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Mellon, Endeavour, and Rotary programs, the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. Curator of the 2017-18 exhibition Goa, Portugal, Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, he edited a book of the same title (Fundação Oriente 2017) to accompany this retrospective of the artist’s work. His scholarly writing appears in various international journals and edited books, including Research in African Literatures, Verge, Society and Culture in South Asia, Gender, Sexuality, Decolonization: South Asia in the World Perspective (Routledge 2021) and Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism (HKU Press 2017). His fiction and creative non-fiction can be read in Riksha, The Good Men Project, Mizna, and The João Roque Literary Journal, while his op-eds have appeared in Scroll and The Wire. At the institute, my aim is to work on a creative nonfiction essay that considers how the loss of life during the pandemic, especially in a small community, affects its fabric. My essay will dwell on the death of my father, and other members of my community, to consider the contrast between these losses and the conception of Goa as a place where the party never ends. 

Lyra Garcellano’s research centers on the exploration of art ecosystems and historical narratives, and her output is often presented as installations, paintings, moving images, comics and writing. She is a graduate of interdisciplinary studies of the Ateneo De Manila University and also holds a BFA degree in studio arts and an MA in art theory and criticism from the University of the Philippines. Her work for the Puon Institute Workshop is composed of a collection of comics and texts loosely titled “Charting Collectives: The good, the bad, and a few raw things about the dynamics of collectivizing”.

Ivan Emil A. Labayne is part of the Faculty of the Department of Humanities, UP Los Baños, and the art collective Pedantic Pedestrians. He has an MA in Language and Literature from UP Baguio and is currently pursuing a PhD in Philippines Studies at UP Diliman. As part of Pedantic Pedestrians, Ivan helped in organizing BLTX Baguio, Book Launch without a Book, Kalsada sa Rengga, and in releasing Tila, Bionotes in Negatives, As a matter of stilling: shots on work from home, among other projects. His creative and critical works have appeared in online platforms Asian Cha and Jacket2, in journals Daluyan, Kritika Kultura, The Cordillera Review, Katipunan, and in the anthology Hindi Nangyari Dahil Wala sa Social Media: Integorasyon ng Kulturan New Media sa Pilipinas. "As a matter of stilling: shots on Work from Home" was a crowdsourced project curated by Pedantic Pedestrians during the first year of the Filipino pandemic experience. It sprouted from the resulting tensions between the halting quarantine life—with outside mobility largely restricted—and the need, variously expressed, to keep going on, to keep working. The project invited contributors to share photos of their “workspaces” at home—one of the ideas and practices the pandemic has forced on us. 

Levi Masuli is based in the Philippines and works on sound and text. 

Jewel Pereyra is a scholar of contemporary Asian American literature and performance. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard University’s American Studies program and holds a secondary in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, Afro-Filipina Aesthetics: Transnational Sound Cultures and Dance Performances, 1918-1978, examines the understudied poetic, theatrical, and musical performances that emerged from transnational contacts between Filipina and Black women performers from the period of U.S. occupation in the Philippines to the 1970s decolonization movements during the Cold War. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and various internal grants. During the Puon Institute, Jewel will workshop her dissertation chapter entitled “Itinerant Moves: Maggie Calloway, Pleasure, and Interracial Performances of Bodabil across the Pacific.” Her essay focuses on Maggie Calloway, a Black-Filipina bodabil dancer and singer born in Manila who toured in Malaysia, China, and Singapore, and eventually settled down in the United States after World War II. Her primary question is: what might it mean to center migratory Black women's experiences, pleasure politics, and experimental aesthetics—which are often peripheral in the archives and scholarship (if at all mentioned)—in Philippine performance histories during the U.S. colonial period? In her free time, she enjoys painting with watercolors while listening to Toro y Moi, hiking in the woods, lyrical dancing, amateur birding, and traveling. She currently lives in Quezon City, Philippines.

David Siglos, Jr. is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Riverside. His dissertation project “Arte-culations: The Novel Form and the Filipino Style of Being” explores contemporary Filipino American novels to describe the inner-workings of everyday Filipino performance. I argue that to think about the Filipino culture as a style is to account for the aesthetic dimension of its production and provide a historical context which corresponds with Philippine conditions of modernity. His research interests include 20th – 21st Century American and Asian American Literature, Filipino American Literature, Postcolonial Theory, Global Modernism, Postmodernism, The Nation and Narrative, The Theory of the Novel, Media Studies, and Theater and Performance. At the Puón Institute, I will be sharing a draft of my dissertation chapter “Empty Stage: Leche, Licentiousness, and the Narrative of Return.” In this chapter, he argues that the novel is not so much about ideas being out-of-place (as I discuss in other chapters) but about a place, or a stage, onto which ideas and performances are being tested out. An Inferno-esque novel set in nightmarish 1990s Manila, what we see in Leche, and its narrative of return, is a biography of the stage (male/gay beauty pageant, talk show, funeral, live sex show, etc.) on which performances of various kinds are allowed to take place. With Leche, we arrive at the novel that is purely performative, a novel that is all about the stage as a place of consumption and arte. 

Ea Torrado is a Filipina artist-healer and contemporary performer whose body of work-- Sisa, Filipinas, Canton, Wailing Women, Encounters and Unearthing, explored the politics of Filipino identity, sexuality, collective rage, spirituality and the Sacred Feminine. She is also the founder and director of Daloy Dance Company. Whenever she feels called, she holds space for community, rest and joy through women's circles and wellness retreats. She currently lives in La Union as a regular tarot reader, psychic medium and gardener, with her 9 cats and primary partner, Chino. 

Cian Dayrit is an artist whose work investigates notions of space, power and identity as they are represented and reproduced in monuments, museums, maps and other institutionalized media. Working with textile, installations, archival interventions and community-based workshops, Dayrit’s work respond to different marginalized communities, encouraging a critical reflection on dominant and privileged perspectives. While informed by the experience of neo-colonialism from the perspective of the Philippines, his work nonetheless defies being tied to a specific position or location. Instead, his work and research cross over geopolitical and supranational bearings. Dayrit is a member of Sama-samang Artista Para sa Kilusang Agraryo (SAKA), an alliance of cultural workers advocating for land rights and food sovereignty. He is also currently enrolled at the Department of Geography in UP Diliman. For the institute, Dayrit will present his work on facilitating counter-mapping workshops. Looking into both process and output, Dayrit seeks to find ways on how to develop the method into a template that can be used for social justice campaigns. 

Gary C. Devilles, PhD is an associate professor of the Filipino Department of Ateneo de Manila University.  He is the author of Sensing Manila, published by Ateneo University Press, which won the Best Book in Literary Criticism in the recent 39th National Book Awards. He took up AB Philosophy and MA in Filipino Literature in Ateneo de Manila University and his PhD in Media Studies in La Trobe University, Australia. Gary is the chair of Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, a 45 year-old film critics group that gives the annual Gawad Urian.

Dr. Allan Punzalan Isaac is Professor of American Studies and English and Associate Humanities Dean at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ. He specializes in Asian American and comparative race studies and examines issues around migration, postcoloniality, gender and sexuality, and the Philippines and its diaspora. His first book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America was the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award. His second book is entitled, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor. He has taught at DeLaSalle University-Taft in Manila, Philippines as a Senior Fulbright Scholar. His current research focuses on death and dying in the Filipino diaspora.

Eisa Jocson exposes body politics in the service and entertainment industry as seen through the unique socioeconomic lens of the Philippines. She studies how the body moves and what conditions make it move – be it social mobility or movement out of Philippines through migrant work. In her creations – from pole to macho dancing and hostess work, to Disney princess to Superwoman and to Zoo animals – capital is the driving force of movement pushing the indentured body into spatial geographies. She is a contemporary choreographer and dancer from the Philippines, trained as a visual artist, with a background in ballet. She has toured extensively in major contemporary festival with her solo triptych: Death of the Pole Dancer (2011), Macho Dancer (2013) and Host (2015) and with the HAPPYLAND series: Princess (2017), Your Highness (2017), Manila Zoo (2021). The Filipino Superwoman Band (2019), a work on the affective labor of Overseas Filipino Musicians was commissioned by Sharjah Biennale 19. She is a recipient of the 2018 Cultural Centre of the Philippines 13 Artists Award, the winner of Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2019 and received the 2021 SeMa-HANA Award for the work TFSB2020: Superwoman, Empire Of Care at the Seoul MediaCity Biennale. 

I’ve been reflecting on the monstrous body as a strategy for rendering the body illegible, and therefore uncontrollable and un-exploitable. The Aswang in the Philippines has become a portal for me to investigate the socio-historical context surrounding the creation of fear and its conditioning, fleshing out the entanglements between fear, monstrosity and the Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW), and the world order that it serves.

Benj Meamo III is an instructor in communication at the Department of Communication, College of Arts and Communication, University of the Philippines Baguio. He is currently an MA Media Studies (Broadcast) student at the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines Diliman. His research interests are media studies, space and spatiality, geohumanities, and cultural studies. He recently had his first solo art exhibit titled, Hangar, A Sense of Place: A Transmedia Presentation of Hangar Vegetable Market, Baguio City. Benj is an aspiring artist, creative writer, music enthusiast, and an activist. He is an officer of the All UP Academic Employees’ Union – Baguio Chapter and a member of the UP Artists’ Circle Fraternity. WIP: Eli V: Baguio Public Market by Night is an experimental audio-visual documentation of the Baguio City Public Market at night. It aims to highlight the relationships and the intersections among space, place, movements, and bodies in the public market at night. 

Jan M. Padios is an associate professor of American Studies at Williams College. Her creative work has appeared in Indiana Review, decomp journal, and the online symposium Architectures of Hiding. Her academic monograph, A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines, was published by Duke University Press in 2018 and won the award for Outstanding Achievement in Social Sciences from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2020. At the Puón Institute, Jan will be workshopping an excerpt of her manuscript Forms for Dwelling. Combining literary and architectural imaginations, Forms for Dwelling is a book of writing, drawings, and photographs that quietly confronts her family’s dissolution and estrangement from one another. The work blurs the boundaries between intimacy & detachment, intuition & analysis, and sensing & knowing. Tracing through lines from histories of colonization and migration to everyday spaces, Forms for Dwelling asks, "What tectonic movements make possible the tremors of our lives?" In these ways, her creative work is deeply informed by her scholarly focus on race, labor, and empire. Jan has a BA in Architecture from Columbia University; an MA and PhD in American Studies from New York University; and an MFA in Creative Writing from Randolph College.

Stephanie Santos is an assistant professor in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. She earned her PhD in Gender Studies from UCLA and was a former postdoctoral fellow with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. In 2023, she will be conducting research on emerging forms of transnational digital labors in the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia as a Fulbright ASEAN Research Scholar. My project for the Puón Institute focuses on care coaches, where teams of “coaches” based in the Philippines and Mexico work round-the-clock to monitor elderly, US-based clients via a computer tablet, all while hidden behind animated pet avatars. I examine the implications of these political and technological turns for the international division of reproductive labor, as internet and communications technologies (ICT) facilitate the transnational distribution of carework to the Global North, without the workers’ migrating bodies. Furthermore, I examine how care coaches themselves forge digital relationships and navigate what it means to work “at home” amid these new assemblages of technology and labor.

Joshua Lim So has received nine Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, is twice awarded by the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition, and was a Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center Fellow for Drama. He has directed several performances, including "Joe Cool: Aplikante", "Cubao Pagkagat ng Dilim", and "Acts of Piracy". His fiction have appeared in "A Different Voice: Fiction by Young Filipino Writers", and "The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction". He has received citations from Science Fiction Research Association Review, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 20th Annual Collection, and The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing. He graduated from De La Salle University. Born and raised in Davao City, he is now based in Manila. He is currently working on performances, films and series, including “Visions of La Union”, an environmental, sci-fi docufiction film revolving around Leeroy New’s Mebuyan’s Vessel. He is also developing “Mga Silid ng Unos” (“Where Tempests Dwell”), a project of three full-length plays ideally being performed at the same time in three different sites. The plays are composed of various interlinked stories set during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this workshop, the participant is submitting the draft of volume one of the work-in-progress.