Mirror Bridge
co-creating a peaceful commons
through the language of art

MISSION
Mirror Bridge co-creates a peaceful commons through the language of art, the closest means we have to universal exchange. We share art, in all its forms, as inquiry, medicine, connection, and restorative action. We honor art as a balm that soothes the wounds and affirms the awe we all experience as living beings. 

VISION
Mirror Bridge is organized by artists, healers, educators, cultural workers, and community organizers, for anyone to engage and everyone to explore. We weave spaces of nourishment, make experiences of wonder, spark individual imaginations, and alight collective consciousness. Together—by offering a free public library, independent practices, in-person gatherings, and more—we build and participate in a reality that reveres all beings and cares for all cultures. 

PROGRAM
Our pilot programs will be anchored by a free public Living Arts Library, to launch with quarterly volumes and a series of special events featuring aligned artists, healers, educators, cultural workers, and community organizers. These openly accessible multimedia portals will offer curated art/works, approaches to healing, and interdisciplinary creative expressions, primarily through dynamic web-based and in-person platforms. Hopefully, a kind of borderless sanctuary for shared reflection and regeneration, inside and out.

PROCESS
Every contributor who makes Mirror Bridge is supported for their participation. Cooperatively, we grow sustainable shared resources, including time, space, funding, and fellowship. Our fuller concept paper / experimental framework imagines how we may evolve and expand. Mirror Bridge will remain a work in progress. 

STRUCTURE
A social benefit hybrid, Mirror Bridge operates as an independent LLC and with a nonprofit fiscal sponsorship via Fractured Atlas. Women-led, Mirror Bridge is co-directed by Julia Munroe Mandeville and Maria Manuela, and we will weave a stewardship circle of councilors, ambassadors, and makers. We are based in New Mexico and collaborating beyond borders.

STATUS
Mirror Bridge is in the research, development, and pilot phase, and we are inviting insights and securing funding to support this process, as well as our forthcoming projects, capstone programs, and foundational initiatives. Our immediate next steps are:

• engage in initial discovery dialogues

• invite core collaborators

• co-refine program and architecture

• secure seed resources to proceed with the library

• open a call for makers interested in joining us as featured contributors
  
  
  

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CO-DIRECTORS
Julia Munroe Mandeville is an award-winning cultural worker, curator, writer, civic artist, and grassroots organizer. With the dream that we can make a joyous, just, and peaceful future by and for all, Julia builds open public programs for lifelong learning, creative expression, self discovery, and collective impact. With over two decades of field experience, Julia holds/held leadership roles at Harwood Art Center, SOMOS ABQ, Tricklock Theatre Company, Creative ABQ, Albuquerque Poet Laureate Program, and more, and she’s a 2024-25 Women’s Impact Alliance Catalyst Fellow. At home where the Sandias and Manzanos meet, she lives and makes in Albuquerque, on Tiwa Lands, with her beloveds James and Iris.

Maria Manuela is a writer and curator based in Santa Fe, where she carries the legacy of a family who has lived there for tens of generations. Motivated by stories, she seeks words that convey the human experience, and all the ways that magic manifests. Maria’s writing has appeared in publications including Hyperallergic, Wild Sam, New Mexico Magazine, UNUM Magazine, Edible NM, Good Mood, THE Magazine, Southwest Contemporary, and more. On any given evening, she can be found gazing at the sunset with pups Ham and Pea, and partner Joel, being grateful for the small moments that are the sweetest juice in this life.

((( share your insights )))