These are the talented peeps who are scouring the interweb, their own backyards, and their iTunes libraries each week to bring you new cultural discoveries to inspire.

Alison Zavos — Photo Editor

Alison Zavos is a photographer and photo editor living in Brooklyn, New York. She’s just discovered blue cheese with honey and she is in love. She is the editor and founder of the photo blog, Feature Shoot.

Francis Andrews
Francis Andrews resides in Brixton, south London, and works as a freelance journalist. His contributions are born out of nothing other than a clinical obsession with digging up good, yet often sidelined, music. Outside of this, he writes for a number of other publications which largely focus on international politics with a humanitarian edge. He is involved in human rights campaign work and has spent time in Central and South America doing just that. Unwinding from the seriousness of the world, Francis will take his guitar in one hand, a glass of red in the other, and weigh up which option suits the moment better.

Ilana Kohn — Illustration Editor

Hailing from Arlington, Virginia, Ilana Kohn went on to attend Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY where she graduated with a degree in Communication Design/Illustration. Ilana remains in Brooklyn where she works full time an an Illustrator for such clients as The New York Times, The Deal, The Utne Reader, HOW, and Kiehl’s, among many others.

Caitlin Zaino — Food Writer

A native New Yorker, Caitlin spends her days between Mexico and Switzerland as an editor and writer for an international think tank. When she is not covering sustainable development and trade negotiations, she is writing and reading—not to mention cooking and eating—all things related to food. Hailing from a typically Italian-American family, a love for food was instilled at an early age. Inevitably, she began working in professional kitchens and eventually exchanged her knife for a pen (or, keyboard really). And while she tends to travel between continents on an all-too-frequent basis, wherever she lands, you can always find her in the kitchen.

Dave Mata

Dave Mata plays bass guitar and synthesizer for a couple of bands in Chicago that you haven’t heard of. That doesn’t make him much money, as you can imagine, so he also plays old records at bars to get by. He curates artwork for local artists, and teaches a music history class to 5 year-olds on the city’s west side. He likes Schwinn bicycles, vacuum tube amplifiers, and bacon wrapped dates stuffed with goat cheese. In the upcoming year, he aspires to open an income based analog recording studio. He is presently trying to figure out how to make more hours in the day.

Kate Barnett
Kate Barnett studied graphic design but has been working as a freelance textile designer and part time illustrator for five years. She creates artwork for swimwear, apparel and trend forecasting companies, and spends her hours between Hong Kong and Australia, loitering between the racks in clothing stores and bookshops, and searching out the perfect steamed dumplings.

Michaella Solar-March

Michaella hosted Up For It, 6-9am Monday-Friday on FBi Radio in Sydney for three years (2005-2008) and now works in various incarnations throughout the music business, editing and writing for Groupie Magazine, as the Publicist for etcetc and Moopjaw, producing for Shoot The Player, and working with Level Two music. She also freelances for a few different magazines and websites, DJs and blogs for movestill.blogspot.com and somegreygardens.blogspot.com. She likes being busy! She also likes red wine, dark chocolate and reading magazines. She hates writing bios.

Yuko Shimizu

Yuko Shimizu is an illustrator and instructor at School of Visual Arts in New York. She has passion for any type of good art, yummy food cheap or expensive, melts-in-your-mouth milk chocolates of the world, and traveling to the places she has never been. When you don’t see her works on the pages of TIME, The NY Times, The New Yorker or PLAYBOY, or on advertising for NIKE, Microsoft or VISA, maybe she is investigating one of her passions to share it with the readers of Lost At E Minor.

Nikki Savvides

Nikki is an Australian writer and musician. As well as contributing to Lost at E Minor she writes short pieces for travel websites and longer academic articles about human-animal relations. She self-published a comic called Ghoul Lash for many years and is passionate about comic art and illustration. Nikki plays bass in Sydney band The Mansons and is currently working on a solo project under the name Ponymeadow.

Katriane Hill

Katriane Hill is a writer based in New York City who has lived in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia. Along with writing screenplays about girls with a penchant for revenge, making mixtapes and designing her own eco-clothing line, Katriane is a comic enthusiast and is currently knocking down doors in that industry. She loves rap, street art, eco-fashion, and languages. The only thing she loves more than writing is traveling the world with her husband and making new adventures.

Sonya Rosendorff

Sonya grew up in small, picturesque Perth, land of breathtaking beaches, with ideas of grandeur and exotic lands across the murky waters of Old Blighty. She studied Fashion and Textiles and dabbled in various jobs, working in fashion, production, knitwear, and wholesale before landing on her feet working in fashion recruitment finding talented and gifted peeps work in their chosen field in London and internationally. She has lived in East London for the past seven years.

Melissa Banigan

Melissa Banigan is an artist, designer, single-mother and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. This past summer, Melissa had her first solo art show in Brooklyn, which showcased her macabre embroidered canvases. Her design-work is shown in various artisan galleries and shops, and will be featured in an upcoming issue of NY Magazine. Melissa is regularly retained by Madewell to embroider at events (including opening night of Fashion Week), and is always looking for some new venue or art-collaboration to explore. Check out some of her work at www.melifera.etsy.com. Melissa’s first passion, however, is writing. Nearing completion of her first novel after six years of writing, she’s starting feel the first tugs of empty-nest syndrome, and is therefore already hard at work researching her new project. In addition to contributing to Lost at E Minor, Melissa keeps a blog: www.meliferasmusings.blogspot.com, which details her life in Brooklyn, which she considers to be the world’s most fertile hotbed for new artistic and musical growth. Photo by Bruno Navarro

Huna Amweero

Huna was born and raised in what she calls the center of the world- Marrickville (situated in Sydney´s inner west). In her 19 years of existence, the highs include finding religion in the music of The Clash and being ‘The Dictator’ in her Russian History class at high school. At the other end, ‘Lows’ refer to being detained at Kings Cross police station for using a fake ID and revealing to her friends that she liked the new Ashlee Simpson single. She is currently half way through her degree in English, but feels maybe politics should be her chosen path, since she recently convinced her mother to travel across the world to see Radiohead.

Andy Howell

Andy Howell has created images over the last 25 years, innovating art and brands for youth subcultures across the art, music, fashion, and action sports industries. Raised on the movements of early punk, backpack hip hop, graffiti, and skateboarding, Howell fell into a DIY modus operandi that guides all his creative endeavors. A former professional skateboarder and co-founder of a number of action sports brands including Element Skateboards, Howell is credited with helping to usher in prevalent trend of graffiti influenced comic style art as the ruling aesthetic in skateboard graphics, creating the first baggy jeans for action sports, helping establish skater owned and operated companies as leaders in the industry, and inspiring and helping cultivate the talents of today’s action sports and art industry leaders including Jamie Thomas, Jose Gomez, Ed Templeton, Shepard Fairey, Dave Kinsey, Stevie Williams, Josh Kalis, and a host of others. Howell’s early creative expressions helped inspire a subculture of alternative artists who have established a contemporary art movement responsible for much of the visual impetus which feeds today’s popular culture. Howell’s renaissance approach to creativity reaches into the visual arts, commercial communications, popular music, action sports, book and magazine publishing, fashion, online social community, and manufacturing worlds. He has written and been featured in numerous books, magazine articles, films, and broadcast media interviews worldwide. His award winning projects for his own brands and clients have included leading action sports companies, underground boutique brands, Fortune 100 companies, art galleries, video game franchises, car companies, fashion labels, Grammy award winning musicians, and a host of others. His paintings, videos, and sculptures have been shown in galleries and museums around the world and featured on the covers of numerous international publications including Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine. Andy is the founder of ARTSPROJEKT, a global community-based technology platform where fans find the freshest products from the most-wanted independent artists, musicians, and brands worldwide. Fusing immediate cultural relevancy, the cutting edge of art and design, and the most powerful made-to-order product technology in the world, Artsprojekt empowers artists, musicians and brands to manifest their creative ideas instantly as virtual retail collections and uses the power of focused community to share their creations with fans worldwide.

Chris Nolan

A self confessed denim head and computer nerd. Chris has been traveling around the world for the past two or so years trying to find some jeans in a mine shaft made in the 1800s. In between mining explorations he finds time to write for a couple of publications on all things denim, life, music and design. He wishes he could draw well, skate properly and sing in tune, not to mention get over his fear of snakes. You would usually catch him on a weekend researching vintage medical equipment with his wife or planning his next trip away for work.

Laura McWhinnie

When she’s not writing ads in Sydney, Laura can be found scouring inner city markets for emerging labels, one-off pieces and quirky antiques (she’s probably the only person under thirty who aspires to be on Antique Roadshow). In her spare time Laura dabbles in Wii portraiture, collects bikinis and has an unhealthy obsession for small statured superstars with repeated names like Ping Ping and Weng Weng.

Xavier Toby — Film Editor

In the above picture Xavier is in Ephesus, Turkey. It was a great trip, however he did meet some really annoying people. The girl pictured to his left was American and not that irksome, but she did have very irritating friends. Along with travelling, Xavier also loves films and believes people be able to list their five favourite films at any given moment. His are: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Dark City, The Departed, The Proposition and In The Bedroom. This list, as with any decent top five list, changes depending on his mood, how much he has drunk and which films he can remember at the time. Sometimes it even includes The Matrix and Transformers, which unfortunately don’t have anywhere near the cultural credibility of the aforementioned films.

Anna Sutton

Anna Sutton is a Melbourne writer who likes to cover vital subjects such as which suburb in town boasts the best swimming pools or where to find the best 50s prom dresses. She loves nothing more than quick getaways, tropical colours, the quiet remoteness of a pit stop in the middle of the night and the thrill of cranking up a great track on the turntable.

Domingo Antonio Robledo

In the midst of a day dream of the Atacama desert, Domingo finds himself working his words constantly. He’s an online editor for SPIN media and a recent global offshoot of online video/DIY reports from around the world. Though currently focused on music these days, his culturalist perspective has been a work in progress for past seven years. Covering art, music, fashion and architecture (not to mention a good interest in food and gastronomy), Domingo has been a managing editor for Planet magazine and an online coordinator for Dwell, a savvy architecture and design magazine based out of San Francisco. Outside of work and cyberspace, he enjoys nature, photography, getting dressed and finding a deal at the old flea market. He also loves taking a nap with his dog “Penny” Arezoo.

The UnCool Hunter
TheUncoolhunter.com (in the search of antiglobal no-trends) is one of the most important online magazines about the off culture and bizarre trends. The main objective of this project is to inform the world about a new trend that is being discovered by a group of Buenos Aires’ observers: the uncool (the OFF culture) is feeding the IN culture (the cool). We show our preferences in the OFF culture after walking round street markets also known as American fairs, flea markets, suburban routes, old towns, remains of a glamorous past that is full of dust and also marginal and despicable cultures that are forgotten in the richness of their varieties. The Uncoolhunting observes the things that do not appear in tourism brochures, rummages in: the retro (the rescue of what was famous some time ago), the trash (the margins of fashion culture), the bizarre and the bad taste (everything that can’t be digested by the consumer market, the eccentric or freak, the extravagant and/or pretentious, the expensive sold at a lower price, the cheap sold at a higher price, the experimental music, the ways of consuming of the non-consumer society, the surreal, the hyper real, the things that cannot be defined, the sub- professional, the sub-scientific, the underdeveloped, the incoherent, the illogical. The Uncoolhunter.com team is Javier Lourenço (editor and founder), Hernando Gómez Salinas, Diego Beyró and Diego Bazzino as the main researchers.

Kira Heuer
Kira amuses her ears with marvelous music, treats her eyes to valiant art, feeds her taste buds bubbly and burgers, is touched by smiling strangers and natures unpredictability, fuels her mind with heroic books, inspiring conversations and traveling the world over. She thinks Love and Laughter are the coolest things in the world and wants to come back in her next life as a writer. Oh yeah, and there is nothing like a good boogie.

Katrina Whitehead

In between delightful afternoon swims at Bronte beach, Kat spends her days working as a freelance advertising copywriter in Sydney. However, she’s at her happiest when accompanied by her backpack, passport and her husband Whitey. With her ‘eat anything once’ philosophy, she’s been plagued by food poisoning so many times, she’s lost count. She’s inspired by the unknown, and loves waking up in a new place, not being able to speak the language, and having nothing more to do than to find her feet. Her travels have led her around the South Pacific, Asia, the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and the UK – and her next adventure is never far from her thoughts.

Sonya Gee

Sonya Gee is into documenting things that get lost in the crowd. A writer/journalist she has been published in Dazed & Confused, SydneySide and the International Herald Tribune. A big nerd, she’s also been involved in the National Young Writers Festival and Vibewire.net. She once sold over 500 lucky dips in a single weekend and leaves small presents for strangers each week inside decorated matchboxes, their contents and locations posted online. She is currently working in news and current affairs for SBS and chasing small stories all over her old neighbourhood, a camera and dictaphone in hand as part of a specially commissioned local history project.

Michelle Wilding

Michelle is a communication lover, art appreciator, musically inclined tea-fiend. From graduate freshie to an award-winning freelance journalist, this ethnically mixed mongrel finds herself writing and snapping away for print and online publications. She previously worked on a national music tour, styled at a vintage fashion showroom and shot photos for poetry books; but now the Sydney native is partial to concentrate on her writing. Her hero is Oscar Wilde. That’s all, kids.

Jenna Black

Whilst studying art history & theory at the College of Fine Arts, Jenna realized her love-affair with the visual world spread across many facets of society. She loves living in Sydney, but would drop it all at once to travel the earth! Jenna is a self-confessed social butterfly and her two obsessions are fashion and art. In her spare time, she may be caught writing about the creative world, visiting exhibitions and drinking coffee. She also collects vintage teacups, and has a life-long love for David Bowie.

Gerry Mak

Gerry Mak tries to floss regularly, but sometimes, when wandering in the deep recesses of the Drúadan Forest, he forgets. He asks that you overlook this flaw. Though he slays shelobs and fell beasts with equal ease, he longs for nothing more than a quiet life raising emus. Oh, what he wouldn’t give for a peaceful evening by the fire, reading from his collection of tales by P.G. Wodehouse as the soft braying of giant, flightless birds lulls him gently to sleep. Alas, this world is too full of evil, and Mr. Mak must continue to battle for justice, even at the cost of his dental hygiene.

Nicklaus Andersen

The meat suit called “Nicklaus Andersen” is most often seen in Athens, GA, but digital recreations are available at his website, along with quite a bit of bedroom — and living room — recorded music and some zany links. Nicklaus gets money by working as a cleaning person in a hair salon and as a music writer for Athens’ alternative newsweekly. It lives in great joy while playing with others, and enjoys reading literature and poetry when the mind pulls out of the electronic circuit. And when master-self takes dog-self into town, both become quite happy.

Kyle Harris

Kyle Harris is a creative writing major at La Salle University in a city called Philly. Originally from Boston, Kyle is an avid Celtics fan and loves to hide his accent. When Kyle isn’t ignoring bad drivers or daydreaming, Kyle likes to play rugby for his school team, write sketch comedy, and adventure with his pals. He runs the Insane Right Brained blog.

Raymond Koh

At 18 years of age, Raymond Koh is the youngest of our contributors. Currently taking a gap year, he is busy working multiple part time jobs to fund his love for clothes. An aspiring artist and wanna be designer, Raymond resides in suburban Melbourne. To his friends he well known for two things: his passion for football (the round ball one) and love of R’n'B music. Ambitious as he is, he seems to believe he will retire by the Spanish Riviera in a mansion designed by himself, own multiple holiday houses, a private jet, and maybe even a nice Caribbean island to top it all off.

Andres Colmenares

Currently working in online marketing and design, Andres Colmenares has been collaborating with several websites around the globe (trendguide.com, senseworldwide.com, theuncoolhunter.com, amongst others) from his hometown of Bogota, Colombia — the so-called South American Athenas’. He enjoys taking photos, travelling and music. In the near future he will launch an idea lab — Proyecto 1982 — which will sponsor projects from young designers, artists and entrepreneurs.

Ben Keys

People are kind of shocked to hear Ben Keys has never seen snow but he’s been very busy chasing the sun on yachts and airplanes from Mexico to Sudan to little ol’ Perth and points in between. When he’s not sailing yachts around for rich people, he is usually fixing said yachts, or telling the owners that’s what he doing so he can use their toys himself. Sometimes he pretends to be a journalist, but most of the time he potters about with old cameras, looks for surf and watches his fave bands in obscure corners of the globe. He has no plans to return to Perth anytime soon, as it’s gotten quite weird there. He runs the Scratch Across The Lens blog.

Jessie Cheung
Jessie Cheung loves reading books from behind her pretentiously large sunglasses. In fact, said sunglasses are almost always present as she partakes in all her nerdly pursuits — reading, writing, painting, counting buttons and shiny bits of foil. Many say that the glasses are there to protect her Asian eyes from the ever glowing Australian sun, but it really is just a way to hide the fact that the eyes have turned square from all the time she spends in front of a monitor, tap tap tapping away at reviews on books that she picked up at the second hand book store down the road.

Allan Soutaris

Allan wanted to be three things when he grew up:
1. A Beatle
2. Jim Morrison
3. Jack Kerouac
As these positions were already taken he decided to travel, write, play music, complete a multimedia degree and meticulously study the entire back catalogue of the Beatles and Chuck Berry. Allan has worked as a website designer, accumulated a small folio and spent a year in advertising that nearly killed him as a man. He has played in many pubs around Melbourne and still doesn’t know what he wants to do. He heard there may be an opening as a Rolling Stone. Allan is proud to know his local grocer, has a steady barber and a proven doppleganger.

If you’d like to become a Lost At E Minor contributor, drop us a message via the Contact page and tell us what you’d like to write about for us.