SEASON 2 drops 12/16/19!

NEW Podcast Jingle HERE

Season 2 Guest Bios & Air Dates

Season 2 Will Air Weekly 12/09/2019 - 4/27/2020

Leigh Gaymon-Jones is a people-centered creative -- she is a mover, a maker and a grower. She is committed to ecology and land-based movements, and has worked in farming and sustainable food systems for a decade. As an interdisciplinary performance artist, Leigh explores themes of personal understanding and human relationship. 

Leigh is inspired by human connection and human capacity. Whether leading a yoga class, performing on a stage, or facilitating a farm workshop, Leigh’s practice is an ongoing invitation for students, artists, and audiences to witness their intuitive creative voice, personal wisdom and inherent goodness.

casfs.ucsc.edu facebook.com/leighrobbiegaymonjones leighgaymonjones.com

Daniel Alexander Jones exemplifies the artist as energy worker. Daniel’s wildflower body of original work includes plays, performance pieces, recorded music, concerts, music theatre events, essays, and long-form improvisations. Energy is his true medium. The Herb Alpert Foundation wrote that he “creates multi-dimensional experiences where bodies, minds, emotions, voices, and spirits conjoin, shimmer, and heal.” 

Jones’s critically-acclaimed performance pieces include Black Light (Public Theater, Greenwich House Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, Penumbra Theatre); Duat (Soho Rep); and Radiate (Soho Rep and National Tour). Jones has recorded five albums of original songs as his alter-ego, Jomama Jones. 

Jones is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, the recipient of a 2019 Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, is a Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, and was a Mellon Foundation Creative Research Fellow at the University of Washington Jones is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Fordham University where he runs the Playwriting Track.

danielalexanderjones.com

My people is (continued): (e) In the words of Toni Cade Bambara, my work as a writer is “to make revolution irresistible;”

(f) This journey has been life long and full of recognition, loneliness, honors, adventure, the sacred, the scary, and the deeply mysterious the more time on this planet I spend;

(g)What we hold sacred as black diasporic people shapes my current work and how to reimagine the livingness of that;

(h) I define my success by how delighted I am with what I have written and created, day to day;

(i) The same way as above;

(j) Too much to explain in any brief way, here (save that for the interview?);

(k) I’m working on a collection of parables;

(l) My current life with my lover brings me joy (we recently rescued an amazing dog)

ALEXIS DE VEAUX, PhD., is one of a stellar list of American writers highlighted by LIT CITY, a public art initiative of banners bearing their names and images in downtown Buffalo, New York, in recognition of the city’s renowned literary legacy. Co-Founder of The Center for Poetic Healing, a project of Lyrical Democracies (with Kathy Engel), and of the Flamboyant Ladies Theatre Company (with Gwendolen Hardwick), ALEXIS DE VEAUX is an activist and writer whose work in multiple genres is nationally and internationally known. Widely published, she authored Warrior Poet, A Biography of Audre Lorde (2004), which won several prestigious awards including the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award. Ms. De Veaux was a member of the faculty of the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, 1992-2013; teaching, most recently, as an associate professor of women’s and gender studies in the Department of Transnational Studies.

alexisdeveaux.com Instagram: alexisdeveaux

(Photo Credit: Sokari Ekine)

Ananya Chatterjea অনন্যা চট্টোপাধ্যায় is the founder, artistic director, choreographer, and dancer for Ananya Dance Theatre, the leading creator of Contemporary Indian Dance in the global arts and social justice movement. Ananya is a 2011 Guggenheim Choreography Fellow, a 2012 McKnight Choreography Fellow, a 2016, Joyce Award recipient, a 2018 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, and a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow. Her last work, Shātrangā: Women Weaving Worlds, has toured extensively internationally, and other touring experiences include Crossing Boundaries Festival, Addis Ababa, (2015), Harare International Dance Festival, Zimbabwe (2013), New Waves Institute of Dance and Performance, Trinidad (2012), and other national and international venues. Ananya is Professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches courses in Dance Studies and technique. She is currently writing her second book, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies, where she re-frames understandings of Contemporary Dance from the perspective of dance-makers from global south locations.

ananyadancetheatre.org

Diane Rodriguez is an anthologized writer, regional theatre director, and Off-Broadway Obie Award winning performer. For over twenty years, she was on artistic staff of one of the largest regional theatres in the country, Center Theatre Group, where most recently she served as Associate Artistic Director. Under her tenure, she commissioned and developed over one hundred theatre artists to create new work for the theatre. Currently, she helms her own company, Rodriguez Projects, in which she directs, writes and produces artistic endeavors and projects for and with other companies. In 2016 President Obama appointed her to the National Council on the Arts, a body to which she still serves. This season she directs productions in Los Angeles, Provincetown, R.I. and San Francisco.

diane-rodriguez.com

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones’ work is committed to exploring strategies for promoting healthy communities through personal Joy. She is an artist/scholar/facilitator who employs Black Feminist aesthetics in her performance work, her pedagogy, and her consulting. She has performed at The New Black Fest (NYC), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and Links Hall (Chicago), and has served as a workplace facilitator with Thousand Currents (Oakland) and NoVo Foundation (NYC). Her scholarship has appeared in The Drama Review, Obsidian, and Theatre Journal as well as solo/black/woman and Blacktino Queer Performance. Her most recent book is Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power for the Present Moment (Ohio State University Press). She is Professor Emerita from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

theatricaljazzbookparty.com liberalarts.utexas.edu

Alicia is an Oakland born Boricua tomboi, a queer woman, a dancer/organizer/troublemaker/performance maker.

Her performance practice is shaped by Oakland turf dance (she grew up in Oakland and her first studio was the sidewalk), tomboy physicality, house dance, martial arts, kitchen and backyard salsa, altar building, western modern forms and, recently, Step. 

She is or has been a proud collaborator/performer with Arthur Aviles Typical Theater, NWA Project, Renegade Performance Group, MBDance, Brown Girls Burlesque,  Roots and River Productions and PISO Proyecto, and has shown work in four of the five boroughs of New York and Puerto Rico. She is a proud organizer with ACRE, Artists Co-Creating Real Equity.

IG: @SkeletonDance14

Lisa C. Moore is the founder and editor of RedBone Press (www.redbonepress.com), which publishes award-winning work celebrating the culture of black lesbians and gay men and promoting understanding between black gays and lesbians and the black mainstream. Moore is the editor of does your mama know? An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories, co-editor of Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Gay/Lesbian Identity, and co-editor, co-compiler and co-publisher (with Vintage Entity Press) of Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books. In addition to her work as a publisher, Moore is a reference archivist at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans. 

redbonepress.com

 (Photo Credit: © Steven G. Fullwood)

Nick Slie is a New Orleans-born performer, producer and cultural organizer and the Co-Artistic Director of Mondo Bizarro. Since 2002, Nick has toured a wide array of imaginative projects to art centers, universities and outdoor locations in 38 states across the country and abroad. However, he is most proud of the work he does at home, in Southeast Lousiana, where the water kisses the land.  Nick’s creative endeavors range from interdisciplinary solo performances to large-scale community festivals, from innovative digital storytelling projects to site-responsive productions. For more than a decade, he has been passionately engaged in rebuilding his hometown of New Orleans, collaborating across sectors on a vast array of local performance and arts-based civic engagement projects. From 2004- 2008, he served on the Executive Committee of Alternate ROOTS and is the former board chair for the Network of Ensemble Theaters. He currently serves on the board for Goat in the Road. Nick is thrilled to be currently directing Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man in addition to launching a new project with Mondo Bizarro called Invisible Rivers.   

 mondobizarro.org

(Photo Credit: Zack Smith Photographer)

E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. A scholar, artist, and activist, Johnson has performed nationally and internationally and has published widely in the area of race, gender, sexuality and performance.  He is the author of several books, including, Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women. His stage play, Sweet Tea—The Play, premiered in Chicago at About Face Theater in 2010.  He is also the co-executive producer of the documentary film, Making Sweet Tea.
epatrickjohnson.com

Stephanie McKee is a performer, choreographer, educator, facilitator and cultural organizer based in New Orleans, LA. She is the Artistic Director for Junebug Productions Inc., the organizational successor to the Free Southern Theater (FST), which was formed in 1963 to be a cultural arm of the Civil Rights Movement and was a major influence in the Black Theater Movement. Ms McKee is a member of Alternate ROOTS , a New Voices emerging leaders alumnus and has been a faculty member and facilitator for the Urban Bush Women Summer Leadership Institute for over 10 years. As an artist, Stephanie believes art is for everyone and is deeply committed to creating art that substantively reflects disparate conditions, and leveraging that art as a powerful tool for change.

junebugproductions.org

Rebecca Mwase is a Zimbabwean-American theater and performance artist, consultant, and cultural organizer working at the intersection of art and social justice. They craft performance, processes, workshops and curriculum that investigate possibilities for embodied revolution. Her work creates spaces to reckon with and release the impacts of oppression while deepening connection, healing and belonging.

rebeccamwase.com

I write, sing, compose, and make interdisciplinary performance work that integrates sound, text, and movement. My creative practice incorporates music of the African Diaspora, embodied ancestral memory, improvisational creative processes, liberation aesthetics, and the development and maintenance of spiritual technologies. My artistic work centers around the role of sound, and the un-amplified human voice in particular, in transforming our environment, our selves, and each other. I grew up in Perry, Georgia and received my earliest musical training at the Saint James Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. I live in New Orleans, make a mean red velvet cake, and can throw down on some biscuits.

ronragin.com

Medicine woman gina Breedlove is a sound healing vocalist, composer,actor, & abolitionist from Brooklyn, Ny. gina began her walk with spirit and music when she was 15 yrs old, singing behind the incomparable Phylis Hyman, and then went on to tour with legendary artist and activist, Harry Belafonte. She created the role of "Sarabi", in The Lion King on B'way, and has appeared in 2 spike lee joints; "livin da dream", & "chi-raq", as an actor, and working on set as a Healer. gina tours the world with her music that she calls "folksoul", holding sound healing circles in every city she visits. She shares, "sound is the medicine that you walk with, and can bring you to presence in an instant" In Goddess culture gina Breedlove is a vocal priestess, think Dianne Reeves & Minnie Riperton having a prayer circle, you will leave lifted.

ginaBreedlove.com vibrationofGrace.com

Amara Tabor-Smith is a dancer, choreographer, and the artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater. Tabor-Smith’s work, as described by the artist, is Afro Futurist Conjure Art. Her dance making practice utilizes Yoruba spiritual ritual to address issues of social and environmental justice, race, gender identity, and belonging. Tabor-Smith is a recipient of the 2018 USA Artists Award, the 2016 Creative Work Fund grant, the 2017 MAP Fund grant, and the 2017 Kenneth Rainin Foundation grant, and a co-recipient of the 2016 Creative Capital Grant with longtime collaborator, Ellen Sebastian Chang. In 2017, she received the UBW Choreographic Center Fellowship. Her work has been performed in Brazil, the Republic of the Congo, New York, and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area where her company is based. Tabor-Smith is an Artist in Residence at Stanford University and faculty at UC Berkeley.

deepwatersdance.com

Sangodare creates media and art for healing and transformation. Sangodare is an artist, filmmaker, composer and preacher. Along with primary collaborator, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sangodare co-created Mobile Homecoming (a national intergenerational experiential archive project that amplifies generations of Black LGBTQ brilliance) and Black Feminist Film School (which facilitates access to and discourse about Black Feminist films and provides film production opportunities to those most under-represented in film and media fields). As artist in residence at UMN (2017-19) and visiting faculty in Film Studies at Lawrence University (2017-18), Sangodare shared Black Feminist Film School approaches through teaching, events and exhibition.

sangodare.com mobilehomecoming.org blackfeministfilmschool.wordpress.com

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, M Archive: After the End of the World, Dub: Finding Ceremony (forthcoming Feb 2020) and the co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. She was dramaturg for the world premiere of Dat Black Mermaid Man Lady by Sharon Bridgforth, is the literary advisor for the Ntozake Shange Estate and the creative writing editor for Feminist Studies. Alexis, along with partner Sangodare, is in the midst of building the Mobile Homecoming Living Library and Archive in Durham, NC which sustains the lives and legacies of Black Feminist elders their legacy bearers and caregivers.

alexispauline.com mobilehomecoming.org brillianceremastered.alexispauline.com