Jamie Lou Thome

Jamie Lou Thome received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. She spent a year in the mentorship program for emerging women artists at Artemisia Gallery in Chicago. Her visual arts work has been shown all over the place; she works primarily with books, collages, installations, and layering oil pastels on top of things. Thome was a founding member of the now-defunct Vespine Gallery in Pilsen. She is a founding board member of Artists Book House and has produced multiple virtual events and programs since the beginning of COVID for ABH.

As a Master Teaching Artist for Opportunities for All, Jamie Thome presents professional development for teachers to integrate the arts into the classroom curriculum. She also works at the Evanston Public Library as a teaching artist in the Loft (teen space), and a library assistant wherever she is needed. In her spare time, she coaches beginning and experienced runners to complete marathons and half marathons, reads as many books as possible, and loves to hang out with her husband Doug and her son Oliver Bean and their dogs, Rosie and Phoebe.

Oliver Bean Thome

Oliver Bean Thome recently became a Freshman at Evanston Township High School, and has been acting since the age of 11, when he was cast in a production of Death By Design at Northwestern University, with the Purple Crayon Players. For the past three years, he has participated in the theater program partnership between Skokie Public Library, the Illinois Holocaust Museum, and Northlight Theatre; with this program, he appeared in We Are the White Rose, Martin Rising, City on Fire, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night.

Oliver also enjoys fencing, gaming, reading, biking, and hanging out with his dogs.

Erika Valenciana

Filmmaker, printmaker and educator, Erika Valenciana–a Chicago native–is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s Film and Video program. She has directed and collaborated on several social issue documentaries. Valenciana’s short film on teenage pregnancy “Athina” was screened at Festival de Cannes Short Film Corner and awarded first place at Columbia’s Latino Student Film Festival. She was a 2015 Diverse Voices in Docs Fellow, sponsored by Kartemquin Films, where she workshopped "La Mitad del Mundo,” which shared the stories of young survivors of sex trafficking in Ecuador through live action and stop-motion animation.

Valenciana was a participant in the 2019 Tribeca Film Institute’s If/Then Shorts program for her documentary “Brewer,” which features women in craft brewing and normalizes their presence in a male dominated industry. She is also the 2019 Diversity Fellow for the Stowe Story Labs’ Fall Narrative Lab for her feature length script “The Punk Show in Chicago.” Valenciana is in production on a short documentary about bird conservation in Chicagoland.

Valenciana’s passion is bringing stories of marginalized groups, particularly women and people of color, from the background to the foreground, and, through her teaching artistry, give others the space and skillset to tell their own stories.