Marilou Mariko Carrera (they/siyá*/she) is a queer Filipinx-Japanese cultural worker participating from the area called Chicago on Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi lands. As an emerging artist with roots in health, organizing, and advocacy, Marilou Mariko is finally comfortable in the home they call body. While exploring personal and collective power as healing, they continue to unlearn assimilation lies, relearn decolonized truths, and learn from family, community, plant, and animal friends to better understand the legacies they have inherited. It is lifelong reclamation work done with words, body, food, textile, sculpture, flipcharts, and community to connect curiosities, histories, stories, and futures.

*Siyá does not translate to English use the way “they” and “she” do, but please know it is a gender-neutral pronoun from the Philippines.