Betsy McCall co-founded the Art Monastery Project in 2008, an international arts organization dedicated to applying the collaborative and intentional “social sculpture” of monastic life to art-making and creativity. In 2013, she published the book Hosting Transformation: Stories from the Edge of Changemaking. In 2017, she published the workbook Live Your Dream: Start Here, Start Now. Garnering degrees from Yale University and San Francisco Art Institute, Betsy’s large-scale pattern-based drawings and videos have been exhibited from San Francisco and New York to Amsterdam and Rome. After four years of splitting her time between Green Gulch Farm / Green Dragon Zen Temple and Art Monastery Vermont, Betsy currently resides at Art Monastery Vermont.

Raphael Sacks has sung, danced, made theater and taught yoga in New York, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Berlin, Stockholm, Dubai. He is a founding member of Loom Ensemble and a core organizer/administrator for the Art Monastery Project. NYC credits include performances at BAM with Meredith Monk; Lincoln Center with Urban Research Theater; and La MaMa with Loom Ensemble.

Neva Cockrell is a dancer, director, and movement instructor. She tours internationally with Pilobolus and directs new dance-theater works in the US, Dubai, and Europe with the company she co-founded, Loom Ensemble. When she isn’t directing or performing, she is teaching her own movement technique, Catalyst Training, which she developed in 2016. In 2012, she joined the Art Monastery Project, and currently serves as a co-director of Art Monastery Vermont. She has been practicing meditation for the past 12 years, and has found much guidance in the Shambhala tradition. Her life path is deeply ground in communal living, body-based activities, art-making, being outside, and contemplative practice.

Qayyum Johnson was born into an American Sufi family & grew up in intentional communities. A bricolage poet/writer, sculptor, sound & video artist & ordinary person inspired by indigenous, folk & street traditions & mash-ups—revolutionary life that stirs the body & mind to reconnect with elemental truth— he was an organic vegetable farmer at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center for over ten years. Qayyum has studied & practiced a myriad of spiritual paths, served on an interfaith street chaplaincy board & corresponds with incarcerated men seeking contemplative comrades. He lives in the aboriginal Abenaki Dawnland of modern Vermont, alongside Kwanitekw, the Long (Connecticut) River.