Candrice Jones is a playwright, poet and educator from Dermott, Arkansas. Residencies: The Ground Floor at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (FLEX, 2018), 2019 Bay Area Playwrights Festival (FLEX), 2020 Humana Festival of New American Plays (FLEX). Additional Credits: Jones received an M.F.A. in Critical Studies from California Institute of the Arts. Her play Crackbaby was nominated for the Wasserstein Prize in 2010. She was a 2019 MacDowell Colony Fellow and is a current Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, MN.

Ruffin is a co-creator and executive producer of Beyond the Crossroads, combining her love for music with her expertise in XR to explore the rich Black history of jazz and blues. A thinker, designer, and leader interested in building sustainable, anti-racist systems and organizations, her work explores leveraging new technologies to combat racial and economic injustice. 

Ruffin is the co-founder of Crux Cooperative, and also serves as co-CEO of Fractured Atlas, the largest association of independent artists in the United States. In 2017, she started Artist Campaign School, an educational program that has trained 74 artists to run for political office. She has served on the governing boards of Black Girls Code and Main Street Phoenix Cooperative and on the advisory boards of ArtUp and Black Girl Ventures. 

Crux Cooperative is a worker cooperative of Black artists working in XR that creates and produces content, provides XR consulting for organizations, and acts as a home for Black creators. Crux empowers Black storytellers and immersive artists, giving life to new worlds of creative possibility through sustainable and abundant wealth and ownership.

Crux has worked with organizations like Microsoft, New York Live Arts, International Documentary Association, Metastage, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Black Public Media, and more to create groundbreaking, thought-provoking, and accessible immersive experiences.

Joanna White-Oldham is an award-winning producer and emerging director from Brooklyn, New York and serves as producer for Beyond the Crossroads. She enjoys creating short-form content and has produced several projects in this format. 

Her short-form work includes The Takeover (2019), The Company You Keep (2019) and Too Much Love (2018), a PSA sponsored by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Her most recent project, Buried by the Bernards, is being released on Netflix in February 2021. White-Oldham holds a B.A. in Film from CUNY Brooklyn College and a Masters in Education from Central Michigan University. A member of the Black TV & Film Collective, New York Women In Film & Television, and Women of Color Unite, she loves classic cinema and dancing to house music.