Sara Nesson, director of Unbound, is an artist, writer, and dramatist with a lifelong passion for all things creative. 

Sara was an avid swimmer, kayaker, and cyclist before her life was altered by ME/CFS. She now tours original monologues to communities around the country, leads a group for artists living with chronic illness, and hosts short dance parties with her husband and two high-personality cats in the living room. 

Unbound is Sara’s first venture into film and she’s grateful to every dancer in the project for their courage in joining her.  

Martin Keogh, AKA The Missing Neighbor. 

Along with being a parent of four, and now grandparent of four, I once toured several continents a year as a professional dancer. I lived a full, engaged life. Then one day I was struck by Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) that left me mostly homebound and partly bedridden.

Amidst the tsunami of symptoms, I’m granted a smidgeon of time each day when I’m able to apply myself creatively. This led to authoring the book: Naked Realities: Living with an Invisible Chronic Illness.

Amy S. (she/they) is a person living with long COVID and ME/CFS, having first been infected with COVID-19 in March 2020. Although now disabled and unable to work, they are a licensed social worker and spent their 25-year career advocating for victims of domestic violence, human trafficking, sexual assault, child abuse, and trauma. Their work evolved in later years to include trauma from an anti-racist/anti-oppression lens. They now use this wealth of experience to advocate for long COVID and ME/CFS funding and research whenever possible. 

Amy also writes the Substack newsletter The Tonic, which provides a lighthearted yet informative take on long COVID, ME/CFS, and other health conditions. 

Amy is a proud spouse, sister, auntie of six, great auntie of one, godless godmother of three, cat mom, hiker, writer, reader, and word game enthusiast. 

Lili Fox-Lim is an actor, writer, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. In high school, she was a lauded athlete and an Academic All-American lacrosse player, but in her last year of college at Stanford, Lili was thrust into battle with ME/CFS, eventually becoming mostly bedridden. Exercise and movement was a huge part of their life growing up, and was suddenly lost - now it is being unearthed in new, smaller ways. Maybe, just maybe, that Lili wasn’t entirely lost.

Crow (they/them) is a neuro-queer, trans educator, social worker, artist, poet, and single mama. Crow is also chronically ill and disabled by both ME/CFS and Long COVID. They began to experience symptoms of ME/CFS as a teen. For decades they would seek medical explanation, tests, diagnosis, relief, and simply to be believed. They were finally diagnosed with ME/CFS by an Infectious Disease Specialist following their first COVID infection, early pandemic, when the severity of their symptoms spiked dramatically. After a second COVID infection a few years later, Crow became disabled and was officially diagnosed with Long COVID. They are passionate about the power of storytelling as advocacy. Crow believes that truth-telling, despite stigma, carves a path to social change.

Cynthia Adinig is an internationally recognized strategist, systems architect, and federal advisor. CYNAERA emerged from the lived urgency of navigating collapsed healthcare, education, insurance, and emergency systems. What began as a crisis response evolved into a modular intelligence lab used by governments, researchers, and communities alike.

Cynthia didn’t just launch a company. She built the system she once needed.

Her insight lives inside every CYNAERA module, from flare prediction to ethical AI overlays. The company’s tools scale with complexity while centering what most platforms ignore: the structurally vulnerable human.

Molly Freedenberg (she/her) is a writer, dancer, artist, and disability advocate living with severe ME/CFS  in Southern California. She received a creative writing degree from Reed College, was an editor for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and has had work published in The L.A. Times and Bust Magazine. She has also co-founded, co-run, or been a founding member of a number of dance troupes, arts organizations, intentional communities, and events. She now writes the Substack newsletter Well, Actually, which explores her life, and culture at large, through a disability lens.

Mary McIntyre is a photographer, journalist, and creator who spent over a decade traveling and chronicling adventures in the Himalaya, Andes, Africa, the Arctic, and many places in between. She is dedicated to preserving the wildness of our world and supports this through her love for storytelling, both narrative and visual. While chronic illness is currently causing her to reimagine her approach to life and work, she generally loves to combine her interest in travel, history and personal connection to share stories of the world's people and places, documenting the diversity of human experience. She has now turned her lens on the territories she calls home, where she splits time between Boulder, UT, and the central Wasatch. Her photography, writing, and silversmithing aims to celebrate and share the wonder and beauty of the natural world around us.

Find her writing at Substack at This Wild Heart.

Hanah Yendler would describe herself as a paint brush wielding, scone baking, copious tea brewing witch.  After a difficult form of Long Covid turned Hanah into a mostly indoor cat, Hanah enjoys making art, picnicking with her tea set, and working long Covid patient advocacy.  Previous to being sick, Hanah was a swing dancer for almost 15 years, performing and teaching regionally in the Bay Area.  Out of everything she has lost due to Long Covid/Myalgic Encephalitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Hanah misses dancing the most keenly.

Judy Shook enjoys being an Ensoulment Coach, artist, InterPlayer, and ritualist. She holds both a Masters of Divinity and a Masters of Creation Spirituality. Judy’s experience includes sneaky deep wisdom practices as a certified InterPlay leader, and shamanic training.  As someone living with Long Covid since November 2020, she brings practices of compassionate, soulful, and artful living. Her classes include deepening your connection to spirit allies, ancestors and creation.  When she got Long Covid, her life became even more focused on the wisdom of her Cherokee, Wyandot, and Celtic ancestors and the spirits of place. Today, she braids her initiations with Indigenous experience alongside Hawaiian teachings, Methodism, InterPlay, and Creation Spirituality into a sacred way that is dedicated to Earth, BIPOC, women’s, and LBGT rights. Grounded in shamanic drumming and the arts of Ensoulment, she is guided to serve in ceremony and spiritual direction.

Jim Ampe got ME/CFS in 2011 from a bad illness. Prior to that he was busy as an engineer and parent of two girls. For activity he would jog in the early morning, bike to work, and play hockey once a week for fun.

Due to passing out during the initial illness, Jim’s first diagnosis was concussion. But his thinking ability never came back. It took many years to get the CFS diagnosis.

Now Jim lives quietly by himself and has a late morning routine of stretching and exercise. He has accepted his condition and feels good if he accomplishes one small task a day.

Chimére L. Sweeney is a retired educator, Long Covid activist, writer, and lecturer whose work centers on empowering Black patients to share their stories and advocate for equitable health care. Drawing from her own experiences with medical racism and her background teaching underserved students in Baltimore, Sweeney has testified before Congress and appeared on The Washington Post’s Post Live to raise awareness of the physical, mental, and financial toll of Long Covid.

A trusted voice in the Long Covid community, she creates inclusive spaces for Black and disabled patients—founding events such as #TheTealReveal, a virtual prom and mutual aid effort, and #BLCEBHMSocial, a social media campaign honoring Black disabled voices during Black History Month.

Sweeney holds a BA in English from Morgan State University and is the curator of The Blackest Side of Long Covid and host of The Blackest Side Podcast on Substack. She lives in upstate New York with her husband, Taurean, and enjoys pet-sitting and painting.

Iman Rahman (she/they) is a chronically ill artist who shares their experiences navigating Disability and the medical system with honesty and heart. A Disabled dancer and writer, they turn to art therapy as a source of comfort, joy, and expression through pain. A self-described softheartist, Iman creates from a place of deep feeling, exploring themes of belonging, embodiment, and healing. The arts have long been their sanctuary—a space to release, reflect, and connect. Living with Disability has only deepened and enriched their creative life.

Lia Pas is a disabled Canadian multidisciplinary artist working in image, text, and sound exploring body and states of being. Before becoming disabled with ME/CFS in 2015, she worked as a composer/performer and wrote music for movement artists. Her recent work includes: embroideries in numerous online galleries, in the anthology Sharp Notions, and in the SKArts permanent collection; poetry and essays in Epistemic Lit, Arc Poetry, and Classical Wisdom; and music in Opera Mariposa's ME/CFS benefit.

Lucian Julien is the creator of Embodied Emotional Processing (a somatic psychotherapeutic technique), an LMT, an embodied vocal coach, a jazz/blues singer and an artist. Before they became severely ill in 2020, they loved swimming, backpacking, taught yoga, hiked, ran, traveled, danced…had a very mobile life. Covid changed all of that. In August of 2024, after years of debilitating illness, they were diagnosed with Long Covid, Mold Poisoning, Lyme Disease, and Compound Autoimmune disorders. They have spent these years of illness really holding the question, how can I love my body and live an embodied life with chronic illness? How can I find mental and spiritual health with this wound? 

They live in Boulder, UT with their dog, Verbena, their cat, Winter and some stunning views. They dance in small doses at night before bed to terrible pop music that they secretly love…each dance is a reminder that they are still alive.

Sabine is a writer, artist, and breath coach. For thirty-five years, she has used qigong and meditation to heal from chronic pain and improve function. She lives in California.

Karin is reinventing herself and focusing on her creative side after becoming disabled by chronic illness.

She loves finding ways to immerse herself in nature, once through activities such as running and backpacking, and now through more meditative pursuits such as her newfound interest in birding.

Her life is currently governed by the need for deep rest and energy conservation. However, as a result of her illness, she has directed her available energy to creative expression in a variety of mediums, including paper making, embroidery, cyanotype, watercolor, quilling, and collage. These activities, sometimes accomplished a few minutes at a time over weeks and months, bring her joy and purpose.