Grace DuVal
It's hard to say when Grace started designing clothes; perhaps it would be easier to say she never stopped playing dress-up. Growing up with a dumpster-diving father and a sentimental, waste-averse mother, Grace has always reused materials to create her own wearable art. When she discovered that there was a whole World of Wearable Art, she knew she had found her calling. Since 2008, she has participated in over a dozen wearable art and recycled fashion shows. Having recently graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Masters of Design in Fashion, Body and Garment, Grace now works for Chrome Industries, where she creates tough messenger bags for bicyclists and, in her free time, sews bike tubes into hand-made jackets, backpacks, laptop cases and anything she can think of. Her love of recycled materials, in the past driven by nostalgia and necessity, has continued to fuel her artwork. Grace draws her inspiration from the materials she finds - the forgotten epilogues of other people's stories.
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Amy R. Biddle
Raised on "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories", Amy has always relished re-tellings of old tales. As a teenager, Amy fell in love with fantasy after discovering a series in which the dragons and witches were good, the knights were dolts, and the princess was a badass. It was perhaps the determination she saw in characters who defied their stereotypes, and the strength in those who rose above a story which defined them, that encouraged Amy to carve her own life despite gender roles and societal expectations. Today Amy is proud to be a merchant mariner, and spends half her life as a mate on research vessels. When not working on the high seas, she is a novelist, short story writer and poet. Through literature, Amy seeks depth in unlikeable characters and finds faults in heroes. She believes that by embracing alternate retellings and divergent epilogues in fiction, we learn to look for all sides of a story, and find new ways to accept each others' differences in real life.