Emily Sullivan is a writer, a photographer, and a director whose work is grounded in questions of land, community, and responsibility. Throughout her work, she focuses on uplifting Indigenous perspectives — not by speaking for communities, but by listening to what people are already saying and doing. Her first film, Shaped by Land, is currently screening at festivals. It’s a documentary about Greenlandic skiers and their connection to place, set against the backdrop of the new Greenland Tourism Act — legislation designed to protect land, center local ownership, and resist extractive tourism. Emily’s interest in Greenland is shaped by her experience in Alaska, where many of the same tensions play out under different economic structures. In both places, people arrive seeking experience, adventure, and meaning, often without reckoning with what those desires take from the communities they move through.

Emily’s path to this work started when she was just a kid. She’s always been an observant person, someone who noticed small shifts in light and weather — that’s where her photographic eye comes from — and that sense of awe never really left. It grew out of curiosity, and later, into a belief that anything capable of stopping you in your tracks is probably worth paying attention to. And then, through her work and time spent in Alaska, climate change became personal and immediate — visible in rivers that don’t freeze when they should, unstable ice, unfamiliar weather patterns, and disrupted fish runs.

Much of her education in climate change came from Alaska Native peoples, specifically women who have been leading this work for generations. That learning shaped Emily’s commitment to bringing Indigenous knowledge, solutions, and sovereignty to the forefront of her storytelling — using careful observation and conversation to explore the forces shaping our collective future.

Kevin Lane is the executive chef and co-owner of The Cookery and The Lone Chicharron Taqueria in Seward, and he was recently named as a James Beard Award semifinalist. Reflecting on that recognition, he says it wouldn’t have been possible without his team at The Cookery, or the kitchens and crews from his past that shaped the way he cooks today. Those roots stretch back to California’s Sacramento area, where he was raised on crockpot meals, black-eyed peas, and lentil stew, before he found his way into kitchens in San Diego. Around nineteen, he was eating street tacos, shucking oysters, and learning the pace of restaurant life — first on the cold oyster bar, then on the hotline, where teamwork and discipline took root. Those early experiences still show up in his food today — the steady presence of Mexican influence, the belief that cooking is ultimately about making people happy, and he’s still shucking oysters.

He was still early in his career when he moved to Juneau to work as a sous-chef. There, and later in Sitka, he recognized the realities of Alaska’s food system, how kitchens relied heavily on frozen and canned goods because they were dependable. Orders had to be placed seven to ten days out, and even then, fresh vegetables and herbs might arrive frozen and mushy. It was a lot different from working in California, where you could order produce in the morning and expect it that afternoon. The learning curve was steep, but learning to adapt is what good cooks do. So, given Alaska’s abundance of fresh seafood, he adjusted his cooking and learned to let fish become the focus. And now that there’s more access to farm-fresh produce than ever before, the constraints that once defined cooking in Alaska have eased, expanding what’s possible on a menu.

Peter Dunlap‑Shohl's career traces a remarkable arc, from daily newsroom deadlines to personal, long-form storytelling. For 27 years, he worked for the Anchorage Daily News, drawing editorial and political cartoons. He produced thousands of comics focused on, more often than not, the worst things he could find in Alaska politics and in the pages of the newspaper — the biggest screwup, the clearest malfeasance, the loudest troublemaker — and then he’d satirize it by cartooning it. This is how a newspaper cartoonist does their job. But he also worked on the comic strip Muskeg Heights. The strip was about a fictional Anchorage neighborhood, and it allowed him to step out of the editorial page — away from politics — to explore the emotional aspects of living in Alaska. He worked on that for about a decade, until Parkinson’s made it too difficult to keep up with the weekly pace of the work.

In more recent years, he’s authored two graphic memoirs: My Degeneration, about his Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2002, and Nuking Alaska, about the nuclear dangers Alaska faced during the Cold War. Both books were something Peter never thought he’d be capable of creating after being diagnosed. But he says that with the help of medication and brain surgery, he’s been able to curb the effects of the disease and accomplish some of the most rewarding and successful work of his life. But he’s careful not to frame the disease as a gift because it’s not. In My Degeneration, he writes that "it’ll take everything from you, everything it has taken you a lifetime to acquire and learn." What is a gift, though, is his reaction to it — the power of medicine, human ingenuity, and perseverance are incredible things. Overall, it’s taught him that he’s not in control, and that on his best days he’s sharing the wheel with Parkinson’s.