UNM-Taos Film and Digital Media Arts (FDMA) Presents "Creators Without Borders"— A three-event panel series redefining media career success, featuring accomplished creators who've built thriving careers in the evolving media landscape.
What if the future of media careers isn’t about picking one lane—it’s about building your own intersection? Or building your own freeway with unique on- and off-ramps?
This panel series challenges traditional career paths and empowers the next generation of media makers to think like creative entrepreneurs. Running from December 2025 through April 2026, the series will feature rotating panels of successful creators—who have built sustainable careers by refusing to be defined by a single skill. The series is not about preparing students for jobs that might exist. It’s about empowering them to create the opportunities that must exist—because they’ll be the ones building them. And they’ll learn from creators who look like them, who come from communities like theirs, who’ve already done exactly that.
Each event, a combo of live and Zoomed-in participants, features a new configuration (or overlap) of panelists, ensuring diverse perspectives and approaches while maintaining the core theme of multifaceted creativity and entrepreneurial thinking.
The three-event series will take place:
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025 — Annual UNM-Taos FDMA “Rock the Future” Showcase
Panel Theme: “Beyond the Label”
Saturday, February 21, 2026 — OTaosuCon: Taos’ First Pop Culture Fest
Panel Theme: “Building Your Universe”
April 23-26th, 2026 (date TBD) — Inaugural Taos Film Festival
Panel Theme: “The Resilient Creator”
December 2nd, 2025 - Episode 1: Beyond the Label
THEME FOCUS: Identity Liberation & Skill Integration
Who told you that you could only be one thing? This inaugural panel aims to challenge the very foundations of how we define ourselves as creators. “Episode 1: Beyond the Label” explores what happens when you refuse to let industry categories, academic departments, or traditional job descriptions limit your creative identity.
Our panelists share their journeys of breaking free from restrictive labels—the moment they realized they didn’t have to choose between filmmaker OR musician, visual artist OR entrepreneur, storyteller OR technologist. They’ll reveal how embracing multiple creative identities didn’t dilute their work—it deepened it, creating signature styles and opportunities that single-skill practitioners could never access.
This session explores: What becomes possible when you stop asking “What am I?” and start asking “What can I create?” We aim for our audience of emerging (and re-emerging!) creators to collaboratively discover, with the panel, how to reframe their existing skill sets as competitive advantages rather than unfocused dabbling, and to learn how to articulate their multifaceted value to collaborators, clients, and the broader community.
Featured Panelists
Jo Rae Di Menno is a music publicist based in Austin, Texas, with extensive experience in handling publicity for projects across local, regional, national, and international media. She served as the director of publicity for SXSW for ten years. During that time, she organized press conferences for prominent artists, including Johnny Cash, Tony Bennett, Nick Lowe, and Carl Perkins. Jo Rae was also the longtime publicist for Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan. Her other current and past clients include Alejandro Escovedo, Indigo Girls, Keith Secola & The Wild Band of Indians, Queen Esther, Ronnie Lane (from Small Faces and Faces), Rough Trade Records, Great Lake Swimmers, Export Music Sweden, Kimmie Rhodes, Jaws of Brooklyn, and more.
Since opening her own PR company, Hard Pressed Publicity, in 1998, Jo Rae has placed stories in most major media, including the New York Times, NPR’s “Fresh Air” syndicated radio show, Rolling Stone, No Depression, Paste, Dirty Linen, Blues Revue, Jazz Times, Sirius Radio, and countless regional publications, radio and TV shows. She’s represented the SXSW music contingents (Canadian Blast, French Music Office, Dutch Rock & Pop Institute, Export Music Sweden, and Invest Barbados) and organized benefits featuring David Byrne, Lucinda Williams, Charlie Sexton, Los Lobos, and many projects involving Alejandro Escovedo. She was also the PR Consultant and Executive Principal for Plutopia Productions, Inc., among other roles.
Di Menno began her music business career as a publicist at Fitzgerald’s nightclub in Houston, TX, which led to a position as editor of the Fitzherald, the house paper published by the club. She interviewed a 13-year-old Charlie Sexton, as well as R.E.M., Delbert McClinton, the Blasters, Kinky Friedman, and many others. She later served as a publicist and the first female DJ at Cardi’s nightclub in Houston.
Dia VanGunten occupies an overlap: novelist, poet, speaker, editor & culture hound. As the creator of the Pink Zombie Rose series, her focus is speculative fiction, but she also writes memoir, poetry and articles on pop culture.
Dia is a frequent contributor to mags like Polyester, Kinda Weird or In The Mood, where she explores art, music, fashion & feminism.
She also appears in anthologies such as Blue Bob: Writing on Bob Dylan or Writers on Hip Hop.
Pink Zombie Rose: Major Arcana Volume I is out now. (Comics from The Arcana Collection, a graphic arm pd the PZR series.)
Dia’s poem-prose style is steeped in surrealism, mysticism and punk.
While currently in New Orleans, Dia is native to Northern New Mexico and her family has roots in Sunshine Valley, north of Taos.
Jerome Morrison is an experience designer, technologist, labor organizer, and advocate for ethical and accessible technology. He believes that truly immersive and impactful experiences are born from well-designed creative processes. With a passion for human-centered systems and experience design, he works to create environments where people—and the stories they tell—can thrive.
In his over six years of work as a digital technologist and product manager, for Meow Wolf, he worked on Radio Tave, The Real Unreal, Convergence Station & Omega Mart.
He is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Isaiah Galante was born and raised in Taos, New Mexico. His creative journey began when he was thirteen when he picked up music. He fell in love with the audio engineering aspect of music creation. To this day he’s recorded well over a thousand songs and roughly twenty albums.
At 16 he picked up video production but didn’t take it seriously until 18. When he began making videos he realized that editing is an incredibly important skill to learn so he dove deep into that for about two years. After getting his associates degree in Digital Media Arts (DMA as it was called at the time) from UNM-Taos, he relocated to Denver in 2021 to start his film business. He both freelanced and joined a few production companies for a several years before returning to Taos to pursue movie and television creation.
Panel Moderator: Maggie Duval
Maggie Duval is passionate about the intersection of technology, art, storytelling, futurism, and community. As Projects and Events Coordinator for UNM-Taos Film and Digital Media Arts, Maggie supports initiatives that encourage student enrollment and expand creative opportunities for emerging artists. She’s the director of OTaosuCon, Taos’ first pop culture festival—encouraging career pathways for youth creators via the art and fandom they love.
A seasoned speaker, Maggie has presented on education, futurism, and the maker/gig economy across venues from Austin to London. Her work explores how technology and creativity can build community, empower learners, and support mission-driven change.
She spent decades co-conceiving and executing immersive events, including productions at SXSW and beyond. In the futures and education realms, she researched and co-developed interactive educational kiosks and curriculum for a technology and media master’s program in Norway. She also co-developed and produced two experiential learning-centered events, called STEAM3: The Future of Education, at the University of Texas, Austin (2014), and Georgia State University (2015).
She has been in tech since 1988, and a freelance web developer since 1995. Concurrent to her work with UNM-Taos FDMA, she is a member-owner of Resolana CoLaboratory—a cooperative that works with mission-driven organizations to experiment with human-centered solutions. Rather than transactional product and service offerings, the CoLaboratory works relationally with clients to discover the tools and approaches each unique challenge needs, from web development and film to interactive design and beyond.