Althea Balmes is a multidisciplinary visual storyteller and arts educator interested in collaborative creative expression to tell stories and make art. Her work is informed by Filipino culture, her diasporic experience and her background in anthropology, international development and interest in decolonial aesthetics. She approaches arts-education as a way to build and bridge communities taking a self-reflexive, intersectional and constructivist style of facilitating visual storytelling. "Bagoong ni Uncle Dan" was originally drawn with sepia ink and ink made from Philippine coffee and turmeric as an homage to homemade knowledge kept alive by the generations before us.