Julia Volonts is a Licensed Art Therapist and Founder of Art Therapy Lab, focused on creating art therapy experiences that promote community engagement, make art therapy more accessible, and inspire new conversations around mental health.

As a dual citizen of Latvia and a Fulbright Program alumna, Julia moved to Riga in 2019 to conduct art therapy research, returning to NYC in 2022. Her international work fostered collaborations with international organizations, allowing her to launch community-based projects that serve diverse populations. Julia has partnered with a range of collaborators, including Paris Collage Collective, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, MARTA Centre, LGBT House Riga, School of Visual Arts NYC, ISSP Latvia, and Kyiv Collage Collective.

In addition to her community-based work, Julia has a clinical background in private practice, where she offers individual and group psychotherapy virtually to adults addressing anxiety, depression, and relationship challenges. Julia is actively involved in the European Federation of Art Therapy, contributing to their Professional Development Committee and Art Therapy in Museums group, emphasizing innovative art therapy approaches. She is passionate about the evolving role of art therapy in mental health care and is excited about the opportunities this residency will offer to advance arts in health programming.

Maija Rudovska is an independent curator, art critic, cultural agent, art historian and educator. She holds an MA in art history from the Art Academy of Latvia, Riga (2009) and has completed postgraduate studies in curating from Curatorlab in the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm (2010). Currently she is a PhD student in the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn. This summer she will be opening an art space Studija (in Kuldīga), which will provide a residency/studio space for creatives to work with new and old ideas, developing them in close connection with the local community.

Rudovska has gained expertise and visibility in both regional (Baltic/Nordic) and international realms of contemporary art, and has worked with institutions and art spaces such as: MO museum (LT), the Manifesta biennial (for the 13th edition in Marseille), the Foundation Ricard (both FR), Komplot, the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts (both BE), Futura (CZ), the Moderna Museet (SE), the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre (LV), Rupert, the Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius (both LT), the KUMU Art Museum (EE), the Living Art Museum (IS), HIAP (FI) and others.

Annemarie Reichenbach is devoted to pioneering cultural projects that hold space for various forms of embodied and communal artistic creation.

After growing up in very rural eastern Germany, a voluntary service in museum pedagogy in Leipzig sparked her interest to study cultural empowerment strategies within a Bachelors of “Intercultural Communication and American (Feminist) Studies“ at MLU Halle. Simultaneously, she was appointed official ambassador for the humanities of the university. This involved counseling young students to create access for those voices underrepresented in the education system. As she is a scholarship holder of Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation, she frequently organizes and attends experiential learning formats in interdisciplinary teams and co-founded the Mental Health Network within democracy educational contexts.

Experiences from other engagements like contributing to the official youth strategy of the German government or becoming an integration guide for children refugees led to the Masters of “Culture and Societal Transformation“ at TU Dresden. As it is rooted in future studies and philosophies of crisis response, she examines creative micro-practices and their potential for cultural resistance, agency in complex transformation processes, as well as healthy communal and environmental entanglements. In particular, her writing explores how the integration of indigenous and folkloristic knowledges, community-centered approaches, and ethical research methodologies can advance the healing capacity of art.

Reichenbach’s recent role as community lead and research coordinator at Art Therapy Lab further cultivates her visions of cross-disciplinary collaborations in order to build inclusive, sustainable art initiatives. She pursues her own mixed-media visual art practice and incorporates her experience in academia through artistic research. Her art practice is very much informed by having been a young carer and exploring intuitive art-making for resilience.

Ilze Rukšāne is a landscape architect and urbanist from Riga, Latvia. She is the founding partner at ALPS (Atelier Landscaping Public/Private Spaces) which she opened together with Helena Gutmane and Marc Geldof on 2005. Ilze holds a diploma in landscape architecture from the Latvian University of Agriculture, a master's degree in spatial planning from the University of Latvia, and has studied garden design in London and Bulduri School of Horticulture and textile art at Riga School of Applied Arts. She is guest lecturer at RISEBA Faculty of Architecture and Design and has been guest editor for magazine Latvijas Architektura since 2009.

In her atelier she works mostly for public space development projects where her focus is on collaborative urban design and public space as a tool for social regeneration. Her special interests and heart belong to the concept of healing landscapes in its broadest interpretation. Ilze herself is wondering, because it seems that volunteering in different NGOs is the most heart warming and also the most exciting projects, e.g. in 2022 the Sporta Pils Darzi was one of the 5 finalists of The European Prize for Urban Public Space.