In the documentary, The Story Behind the Notes, Adrian Anantawan wears a black turtleneck and a thin slice of light separates his body from the black background while he plays his violin. Floating behind him, there’s a silent video of a man at Bloorview Macmillan Children’s Centre fitting Anantawan’s violin adapter to his right arm, the one that holds the bow stroking the strings. The scene behind Adrian as he plays changes to men constructing his prosthetic arm from scratch. The process is as meticulous as Anantawan’s playing, like how precise the tightness of the adapter needs to be in order for him to bow. As a nail spindles into the adapter, Anantawan plays his final note, and everything goes to black. 

When Anantawan began the violin at 10-years-old, he would play for the prosthetists at the Children’s Centre, a rehabilitation center in Toronto, where his parents brought him because he was born missing his right hand. Now, Anantawan’s performances include audiences at the White House, the Opening Ceremonies of the Athens and Vancouver Olympic Games, and the United Nations.

As seen in his official bio, Anantawan “helped create the Virtual Chamber Music Initiative at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehab Centre [, bringing] researchers, musicians, doctors, and educators together to develop adaptive musical instruments capable of being played by a young person with disabilities within a chamber music setting.” Anantawan—who holds degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music, Yale University, and Harvard Graduate School of Education—founded the Music Inclusion Program for children with disabilities who want to learn an instrument. He asks the audience at his 2012 TED Talk:

“What if we use technology through art disability and education to be able to reveal the inner humanity of kids with Cerebral palsy, children with Down syndrome? Accessibility is not an act of charity. It’s one of lifting the ceiling of potential developments so all children can explore this world but also possibly create new ones.”

Later, The Story Behind the Notes shows Anantawan against a green screen with a room full of people setting up for the video shoot. The scene returns to the black background, and the violinist begins to play. The black background becomes newspaper articles singing the praises and many accomplishments of Anantawan.  Then, you hear his voice over his violin: 

“I don’t think people care about disabilities. It’s what you do on top of those disabilities that people gravitate towards, and that’s what you have to keep on doing or else what are you trying to be? Nothing much, except another disabled person.”

Through his music and advocacy, Anantawan has and continues to use his platforms to create not only modes of representation, but also material change for and alongside people with disabilities.

Samuel Beebe is a composer and sound designer exploring the dramatic possibilities of music and sound via collaborations that result in concert, stage, film, and installation works. He collaborated with OBIE-winning stage director Mallory Catlett, as well as Ensemble Decipher, exploring the sonic unpredictability of performing music over video-conferencing software. Beebe’s eco-dystopian opera Biophilia was workshopped by Stony Brook Opera, and in 2018, Chelsea Symphony premiered his orchestra piece The Rest is Silence in New York City. He holds a Ph.D. in Composition from Stony Brook University, and serves as Visiting Lecturer at Salem State University and Merrimack College.

In her StyleLikeU: What’s Underneath Pride Series feature, adrienne maree brown asks, “How would I be with my body if there was nothing to fix? Like, there is nothing to fix except the lens that I’m looking through.” Adorned in a floral dress, bracelets that stack up along her forearm, and shoes gifted to her by Beyoncé, brown unveils herself both literally and figuratively as she tells us of her ethos, politics, and life as writer, editor, scholar, doula, and activist while taking off her clothes one item at a time.

In an interview with The Laura Flanders Show, brown tells us that “pleasure is how we reclaim our full selves, and once we have that, we will no longer settle for suffering as our way of life.” She attributes the ways that she had unlearned the power and necessity of pleasure to the way that “Black women have been trained to be in service with our bodies rather than in pleasure in our bodies” and that now, for her, “pleasure is actually a measure of freedom. It’s a way that we say, ‘I have decolonized, I have returned to myself, I have been healing.’”

brown’s praxis is largely influenced by Octavia Butler and Audre Lorde and is located in the desire for pleasure and joy for Black people and people of color. In her book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, she quotes from Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, “In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, and self-denial.”

Having begun her work at the Harm Reduction Coalition, she has become an essential figure in the restorative justice movement as well as fostered the development of organizations such as BYP100, the Rising Majority, and Black Lives Matter Her other books include Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation and Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Stories and Poems.

At the end of the StyleLikeU interview, brown is in her swimsuit. As she wipes off her lipstick, the interviewer asks her the last question, “Why in your body, in your skin, in your journey, why is it a good place to be.” brown replies,

“I’m one of the freest people to ever live. And not only am I alive, but I’m alive in all of the best identities, you know…I’m fat, I’m queer, I’m Black, I’m multiracial. All of these places where oppression has been the experience for so long are now coming into freedom and coming into agency. And I’m like, in the intersection of all.”

When Rebecca Cunningham hires a new writer to reinvent fairy tales for the Girl Tales podcast, she tells them this: write the story that you needed to hear as a kid, but never did. It’s a simple premise, a podcast featuring reimagined folktales, fables, and myths, where girls get to be heroes. Yet its impact on young audiences, and the adults who care for them, is profound.

“Caregivers are really excited to hear stories where their kids are at the center of the narrative, because they don't necessarily see that everywhere else,” Cunningham says about the show’s growing listener base.

After working as a theater director and nanny in New York City, Cunningham admits to dreaming of a children’s podcast years before she made it a reality. It wasn’t until the 2016 Presidential election results were finalized that she knew it was time. Watching Hillary Clinton give her concession speech, Cunningham remembers holding a little girl in her arms at the time, thinking about what the future holds for girls who dare to dream.

“That was it. I'm going to adapt fairy tales so that girls are the heroes. Done. I'm going to hire the people I work with in theater or the people who I've always dreamed of working with. And that's where Girl Tales began,” Cunningham recounted for Diggit Magazine earlier this year.

Cunningham worked with her friend Chad, who first introduced her to podcasting, and raised $5,000 to launch Girl Tales. Four years – and four podcast seasons – later the Girl Tales Podcast team has grown to include women, non-binary and trans playwrights, a production crew, and voice actors.

Caregivers searching for diverse narratives will certainly find that here, as intersectionality is core to Girl Tales’ storytelling. Beyond Western classics, listeners will also hear stories from Dominican mythology, fables from the Jewish tradition, folktales set in Korea, and twists on Akan tales from West Africa.

Thinking of the year ahead, Cunningham looks forward to sharing the fantastical magic of Girl Tales with even more children. “I want to provide content that other podcast networks just don’t cover. I know there are kids, non-binary children for instance, who need to hear themselves at the center of these stories.”

“Helping other people achieve what they want to achieve: That’s my way of making change,” is what Erik Bruner-Yang told District Fray Magazine in early June.

On the tail end of another COVID-19 surge, the restaurant industry is still recovering from mass lay-offs and closures. It was a crisis that many didn’t expect, but Bruner-Yang wasted no time taking action with the launch of the Power of 10 Initiative. Bruner-Yang and his nonprofit team worked to raise $10,000 weekly, subsidizing 10 full-time jobs for laid-off restaurant workers and providing 1,000 meals to frontline workers.

“The Power of 10 aims to change that fate for as many restaurants in as many cities as possible, by empowering them to employ their staff, maintain their operations, and feed the people in their communities who need meals the most,” he explains.

It’s a simple concept with an enormous impact. Already, The Power of 10 donated 350,000 meals, and turned what was once a rapid-response effort into a long-term program.

Success for the DC restaurateur isn’t about how many restaurants he owns—at one point, he operated seven—but helping newcomers access the opportunities he once needed.

Having made his culinary mark on such D.C institutions as ABC Pony, Toki Underground, Brothers and Sisters, and Spoken English at The Line, Bruner-Yang is a self-identified member of the food scene’s old guard. Currently the owner of Taiwanese-Cambodian café Maketto, Yoko & Kota food stall, and Shopkeepers corner store, he remains committed to community efforts to end hunger in D.C—and beyond.

Fresh off an international stint serving meals to Ukrainian refugees through the World Central Kitchen, Bruner-Yang is grateful for any opportunity to be of service. “I definitely left feeling I didn’t accomplish much — there’s so much to do,” he says of his time on the Poland-Ukraine border.

From food justice to sustainability, there’s no shortage of wicked problems to solve in the food world, and Bruner-Yang is more than ready for the challenge.

When Fly Zyah won the WKYS Verses at six-years-old, she told radio host Little Bacon Bear that she opened the window and chanted her own name, “Zyah! Zyah!” Now at the age of 10, you can hear crowds chanting her name whether she’s performing at music festivals or being featured on the news.

Fly Zyah is a groundbreaking young rapper who is showing the world that young people are keenly aware of the world around them and ready to stand up for what is right. Covering topics from social justice to the youthful joy of riding bikes with her friends, FlyZyah’s music is reaching across generations.

Her record, “Dear DC,” is both a call to justice and a love letter to her city: “I’m a witness / I can see what’s going on / I hope you listen / ‘cause imma put it in my song / I know the difference / between what’s right and what’s wrong / this is business / we’ve been fighting for too long.”

In these opening lines, she is telling us that her youth does not exempt her from knowing the truth of injustice. “Dear DC,” is calling her city in, which is a display of her love for Washington, D.C. As James Baldwin says, “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” Whether or not the city listens, she asserts, she is going to make her voice heard. 

With mentorship from her father, she began her musical journey at age two. At the age of six, Fly Zyah released her debut, “Ride My Bike,” and has since been featured on radio stations such as WKYS 93.9, WPGC 95.5, WHUR 96.3, and WPFW 89.3. In September 2021, she received the D.C. Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in Youth Creativity. Having graced the stage with artists such as Rapsody and Big Daddy Kane, she has received praise outside of the music industry as well, from actress Viola Davis to activist Tamika Mallory. Rapsody, one of Fly Zyah’s biggest inspirations, praises Fly Zyah’s talent, saying that the young rapper is “200 times better” than she was at that age.

The “Fly” in Fly Zyah stands for, “First Love Yourself.” It is a gift to see the myriad ways that the young D.C. rapper has been loving herself, her family, her friends, and community at large by tending to her gift and sharing it with us all. As she raps in “Dear DC,” “I always try to represent / but the city don’t represent me / I try to be the best / but you fail to see what’s in me.” Despite this, Fly Zyah has been and continues to make herself seen and show the world that she is a force for change.

Samsher (Sam) Singh Gill is the third president and CEO of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF), a New York-headquartered, national philanthropic organization that supports the performing arts, medical research, the environment and child well-being. He also serves as president of several operating foundations that run under DDCF’s umbrella, including the Duke Farms Foundation, which operates a center for environmental stewardship in Hillsborough, N.J., and the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, which operates a museum for learning about the global cultures of Islamic art and design in Honolulu as well as a New York-based grants program with a related mission.

Prior to joining DDCF in April 2021, Gill was senior vice president and chief program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where he oversaw more than $100 million in annual grant making across the foundation’s programs, in addition to managing Knight’s research and assessment portfolio and its grants administration function. Previously, he also served as vice president of Freedman Consulting, LLC.

Gill also served on the board of the Philip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Miami and on the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He attended the University of Chicago and the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Mori Granot-Sanchez, based in RI, is the founder & director of Rhode Island Latin Dance, a dance school she started in 2012. In 2017 she launched her professional dance team, RILD-Synergy.

Mori currently teaches weekly salsa classes at the Brown University Salsa Club, she directs their performance team “Alma Salsera”, and runs various after-school dance programs and classes throughout the State for inner-city youth in high schools for art credits.

• Mori began her dancing at the age of 5 in Haifa, Israel. She started her dance journey with Israeli folk, jazz, modern and ballet.
• She began salsa dancing at the age of 17.
• Her travels led her to move to the US in 2006, where she would later pursue her love of salsa and embark on a professional career in dance.
• In 2008 she started dancing and performing in RI with a local dance company.
• In 2011 She started training and working with Masacote Entertainment and participated in a dance & music research program in Cuba and Puerto Rico through Meta-Movements Dance Co.

In 2017 Mori started performing and teaching with Masacote Dance Company. (MasaWomen's Troup, Masa2 and Masacote Dance co.)

Mori is a dancer, teacher, choreographer and a performer who focuses on salsa as a teaching tool for self-development and inclusivity.

Currently, Mori is teaching and performing with her own dance company and collaborates with different artists through various dance projects.

For Mori, life is a never-ending cycle of lessons; she believes each day should be lived to better oneself. She believes that personal enrichment means nothing unless you can bring the best out of your fellow dancers and improve the dance community by creating a safe non-judgmental space for people of all races, genders and backgrounds to come together and dance.

Lil Miss Hot Mess serves on the board of Drag Queen Story Hour and is the author of the children's books If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It (Running Press Kids, 2022) and The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish (2020).  She has also appeared on world-class stages like SFMOMA, Stanford University, and Saturday Night Live, was a founding organizer of the #MyNameIs campaign that challenged Facebook’s “real names” policy, and has published essays in The Guardian, Wired, and Salon.  When not twirling, Lil Miss Hot Mess is a professor of Public & Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona.

Evon Mahesh is a student at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, and the Field Director at Student Voice. Their work starting in high school has always been centered around student-centered learning, transformational school models, and making sure that marginalized youth's voices and perspectives are the drivers of school change. In their role at Student Voice, Evon supports the organization's programs, which focus on equipping high school students as storytellers, organizers, and institutional partners. Evon believes in and strives toward a world where education spans beyond classroom walls, where learners drive their own experiences, and where community connection and exploration are at the heart of schooling.

“I always live at the intersection of art and community,” says Cecilia (Ceci) Méndez-Ortiz, a proud Latinx artist and educator, with a track record of centering equity in arts and cultural work.

As the current Executive Director of the Center for Art and Community Partnerships (CACP) at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, she draws on years of experience as a museum educator, curator, instructor, artist, and board member.

Méndez-Ortiz, whose mother was a craftsperson who ran her own business in New England, says her I infatuation with the collaborative capacity of art began when she was a child. With dual citizenship in the United States and Panama, her parents and elders helped shape her worldview.

In her role at the CACP, Méndez-Ortiz partners with communities to create transformative arts experiences that foster connection. She’s most known for creating “sparc! The ArtMobile,” a traveling arts van that curates innovative workshops, paint nights, and special events to underserved neighborhoods in Boston.

“Everything was community driven, from what the van would look like and what role it would play in community events,” she said, reflecting on the tenth anniversary of sparc! – first making its debut in Mission Hill, Boston. “Ultimately, sparc! belongs to the neighborhood and to the neighbors.”

So often, marginalized communities aren’t afforded the resources to invest in local public art and creative placemaking. Méndez-Ortiz tackles systemic issues like these head on through the Radical Imagination for Racial Justice regranting program, where she serves as Co-Director. A collaboration between MassArt, the City of Boston, and the Surdna Foundation, this $1.2 million program provides funding to BIPOC artists and “to those seeking to advance racial justice through collaborative projects in their communities.”

Moreover, Méndez-Ortiz believes in leading with love, and knows that the best creative pursuits are not done in a vacuum, but with the help of a supportive team. “My work is guided by deep collaboration with other creatives, artists, and community-builders. I love the people I get to work with.”

Clayton Norris is a visual artist and musician from North Texas.

His mediums include video art, painting, sculpture, electronic music, and film focusing on the relationship between old and new media, with an emphasis on technology and its role in codifying popular culture.

Norris incorporates themes of nostalgic imagery, idealized narratives from his childhood, and popular film. He employs techniques of analogue synthesis, sample manipulation, and tape distortion in his practice, and performs electronic music with the band Vogue Machine.

Salma Ocelotlxochitl Perez resides and occupies Outsagna, Tongva territory also known as the North-East part of Los Angeles. Salma is an Indigenous Zapoteca, Mixteca. She is a cultural bearer, danzante, student, community member, and advocate for education equity, social justice, and indigenous peoples' autonomy. Salma is an alumna of Anahuacalmecac International Preparatory of North America a k-12 institution that provides an autonomous community-based education rooted in culture, identity, and academic excellence.

Salma has attended Mount Saint Mary’s University for the past years pursuing a bachelor's degree in liberal arts with an emphasis on political science. Salma is a lead organizer with Our Turn, an organization that works to advance equity in education systems in cities across the country. As well as a member of the La Comadre Network, a network that focuses on education equity and justice that provides a platform for marginalized communities across the nation. In the past few months, Salma has been working as a staffed writer on an upcoming Storytelling Project about Urban Indigenous youth with Amazon Prime.

Jill Sonke, PhD, is research director in the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida (UF), director of national research and impact for the One Nation/One Project initiative, co-director of the EpiArts Lab (a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab at UF), and currently serves as Senior Advisor to the CDC Vaccine Confidence and Demand Team on the COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence Task Force. She is an affiliated faculty member in the UF School of Theatre & Dance, Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases, the Center for African Studies, the STEM Translational Communication Center, and the One Health Center, and a consulting editor for Health Promotion Practice journal. 

Jill studied dance at Interlochen Arts Academy, the Florida State University, in London, Paris and Athens with teachers of the Horton and Duncan techniques including Bella Lewitsky, Lynda Davis, Milton Meyers, Joy Kellman, Lori Belilove, Julia Levine and Hortense Koluris. She has been a principal dancer and soloist with Lori Belilove & the Isadora Duncan Dance Company in New York and a guest performer and choreographer with Dance Alive! and Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theatre.

With 27+ years of experience and leadership in the field of arts in health, Jill is active in research, teaching, and international cultural exchange. She is a mixed methods researcher with a current focus on population-level health outcomes associated with arts and cultural participation, arts in public health, and the arts in health communication. She is the recipient of a New Forms Florida Fellowship Award, a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Award, an Excellence in Teaching Award from the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, a UF Internationalizing the Curriculum Award, a UF Most Outstanding Service Learning Faculty Award, a UF Public Health Champions award, a UF Cross-Campus Faculty Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and over 300 grants for her programs and research at the University of Florida.

President and CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP)–a membership organization focused on service to the performing arts field–since 2020, Lisa Richards Toney has built a career upon her artistic background as a dancer with pivots into arts education and, most robustly, arts administration. She tells Arts Engines with Aaron Dworkin:

You think about all the things you can reinvent for yourself, what is the business model that you would actually like to be in, who in the field of fields, I'm not just talking about the arts, the field of fields, who would we most like to be like, where do we share things…what are some of the things we can learn from other industries as we build forward?

Her over 20 years of experience includes key administrative roles in organizations like the Abramson Scholarship Foundation, the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, The American Place Theater, The Library of Congress, and the Debbie Allen Dance Academy. Richards Toney is also currently the Strategic Planning Chair of the Mosaic Theatre Company of DC.

She credits Carol Foster for inspiration and early opportunities. When Richards Toney was 14, Foster gave her the opportunity to manage and organize some components of the DC Youth Ensemble. Richards Toney kept trying out new ventures, like the summer training program at Alvin Ailey School when she was 19. About her drive as a young woman, she says, “How we spend this time says a lot about where we will go.”

Richards Toney has gone from feat to feat throughout her career, always being open to reinvention. How has she been able to create and sustain such a lineage? She claims to be a people person.

Everyone needs a space for self-expression and with me to bounce off my ideas is a cherished act. [...] We all need these safe spaces as leaders, as people, we need a friend, we need people to talk to.

Richards Toney’s current work at APAP has allowed her to utilize the skills she accumulated through following her drive and interest. These many perspectives on the performance arts field have taught her how important service is to its workers and organizations. “We've had to pivot,” she says, “to ensure that our services are relevant and meaningful to the needs that are ever-changing and dynamic in the field.” 

And so, Lisa Richards Toney has seen the arts from every angle–she has gone from “shy girl” who gained a voice through it, to an arts educator working “to ensure that young people develop the confidence and the experiences to basically launch themselves forward,” to an administrator working to meet the needs of both artists and educators with space and resources.  “What I longed for in a career,” she says, “was the chance to use all of my skills.” She has made reinvention an artform.

Clyde Valentín is a Creative Producer, Cultural Entrepreneur and Strategist. He has over twenty years of executive experience managing start-up organizational environments, multidisciplinary projects and live events. Born and raised in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, he is the Co-founder and former Executive Director of Hi-ARTS (formerly known as the Hip-Hop Theater Festival). In 2014 he became the inaugural Director of Ignite/Arts Dallas: A Center for People, Purpose + Place, the community engagement initiative at SMU Meadows School of the Arts. The mission of Ignite/Arts Dallas is to challenge the imaginations of students and citizens to envision more just and vibrant communities through art and culture experiences. In 1995 he co-founded Stress Magazine, a pioneering Hip-Hop arts & culture publication, first as its Senior Editor and then as its Director of Operations. Clyde was a 2015 Community + Culture Fellow of the National Arts Strategies’ Chief Executive Program.

Valentín is well networked across the local, regional and national Arts & Culture ecosystems. He is an advisory committee member of the Latinx Theater Commons and Howlround and has served as a consultant or panelist for numerous national organizations and foundations including the Knight Foundation’s New Works Program (Miami), the Rasmuson Foundation (Alaska), Creative Capital, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), Youth Speaks/Brave New Voices, the New England Foundation for the Arts, Theater Communications Group (TCG), the National Association of Latino Arts & Culture (NALAC), the National Performance Network (NPN), AlternateROOTS and the Center for Cultural Production/SIPP Culture (Mississippi). He serves on the Boards of Texans for the Arts, the only statewide advocacy organization for public funding in the Arts in Texas, the Trinity Park Conservancy (Dallas) and Yerba Center for the Arts (San Francisco).

Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, a $16 billion international social justice philanthropy. He is a member of the Reimagining New York Commission and co-chair of NYC Census 2020. He chaired the philanthropy committee that brought a resolution to the city of Detroit’s historic bankruptcy. Under his leadership, the Ford Foundation became the first non-profit in US history to issue a $1 billion designated social bond in US capital markets for proceeds to strengthen and stabilize non-profit organizations in the wake of COVID-19.

Before joining Ford, Darren was vice president at Rockefeller Foundation, overseeing global and domestic programs. In the 1990s, he was COO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, Harlem’s largest community development organization.

Darren co-chairs New York City’s Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, and has served on the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform and the UN International Labour Organization Global Commission on the Future of Work. He co-founded both the US Impact Investing Alliance and the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy and is a founding member of the Board Diversity Action Alliance. He serves on many boards, including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the National Gallery of Art, Carnegie Hall, the High Line, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. In the summer of 2020, he was appointed to the boards of Block, Inc. and Ralph Lauren. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and is the recipient of 16 honorary degrees and university awards, including Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal.

Educated exclusively in public schools, Darren was a member of the first Head Start class in 1965 and received BA, BS, and JD degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. He has been included on numerous leadership lists: Time’s annual 100 Most Influential People, Rolling Stone’s 25 People Shaping the Future, Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, Ebony’s Power 100, and Out magazine’s Power 50. Most recently, Darren was named Wall Street Journal’s 2020 Philanthropy Innovator.

Damon Davis is an award-winning post-disciplinary artist who works and resides in St. Louis, Missouri. His work spans across illustration, painting, printmaking, music, film, and public art. His solo exhibition, Darker Gods in the Garden of Low Hanging Heavens premiered in St. Louis in 2018, later traveling to Art Basel Miami 2018. Davis has work in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts and the San Diego Contemporary Museum of Art. For the documentary short A Story To Tell (2013), which profiled Davis, his work, and the creative process, Davis won an Emmy Award Mid-America for Best Short Form Program. His work has been nominated for Critics’ Choice Award, Gotham Award, and NAACP Image Award; Filmmaker Magazine selected him and Director Sabaah Folayan for their “25 New Faces of Independent Film 2016” for their work on critically acclaimed documentary Whose Streets?, chronicling the Ferguson rebellion of 2014. Davis is a 2015 Firelight Media Fellow, a 2016 Sundance Music and Sound Design Lab Fellow, a TED Fellow (2017), and a Root100 Honoree (2017).

Liss LaFleur (she/her/hir) is an American artist, educator, and activist. Through interdisciplinary arts-based research, she explores queer identity and the future of feminism. Her work has been widely exhibited and screened, including at: the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; SXSW; on PBS/ POV Digital; the Reykjavik Art Museum, IS; TATE Modern, UK; Galeria de Arte, Santiago, Chile; the Hearst Museum at Berkeley University; the Museum of Glass, US; and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, South Korea.

LaFleur has received awards and fellowships from the John F. Kennedy Center, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the College Art Association, and the Ford Foundation. She has been a finalist for the Foundwork Art Prize (2019), Art Prize (2017), the Aesthetica Art Prize (2018), the Lumen Prize (2016), and a Webby Award (2019). In 2020, her work was acquired into the #MeToo Digital Media Collection at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard. LaFleur earned an MFA as an Arts Fellow from Emerson College in Boston, MA and is currently an Associate Professor of New Media Art at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX. She is currently represented by Galleri Urbane Marfa + Dallas.

Ana Masacote is an award-winning Afro-Latin dance artist and performing arts curator who loves engineering spaces for community connection and conversation through the arts. She has spread the salsa bug to more than 30 countries and is the founder of Dance to Power, an online Afro-Latin dance academy. Through her social impact initiatives, Ana advocates for LGBTQ inclusivity and gender and racial equity in the arts. In 2017, she helped establish a scholarship initiative for Latinx MA artists as former executive director of Yo Soy LOLA, a movement to reclaim the Latina narrative through artistic platforms. Ana holds a BS in Management Science from MIT. Award highlights include: 2022 MCC Artist Fellow, 2020/21 Kennedy Citizens Fellow Artist, 2019 YWCA Cambridge Woman of the Year, 2019 WBUR Artery 25, and the 2014 SBA’s MA Minority-Owned Business of the Year Award.

Anthony Torres is a writer, performer, and Executive Director of Combat Hippies, an ensemble of Puerto Rican military veteran performing artists based in Miami, Florida. A grandchild of Puerto Rican immigrants, Anthony was born in New York City and raised in Utica, New York. Following high school, he enlisted into the military and later deployed to Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq where he provided mental health treatment to deployed troops, coalition forces, and Iraqi detainees. The Combat Hippies was founded in 2015 during a veterans creating writing workshop created by MDC Live Arts and led by renown theater artist and director Teo Castellanos. Their latest and most ambitious project, AMAL, premiered during MDC Live Arts 2018/19 season and is touring nationally. AMAL explores the quest for meaning, purpose, and identity sought through enlisting in the military and shares the unifying experiences of both combatants and noncombatants as people of color. This all-Puerto Rican theater company places Puerto Rico’s colonial status, cultural, and military heritage center stage. Anthony holds a MS in Psychology from Carlos Albizu University and a Master’s degree in Social Work from Barry University.

Beatrice Thomas, director of Authentic Arts & Media, is a national multi-disciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and creative producer. Whether through creative production, consulting or equity, diversity, and inclusion workshops, Mx. Thomas' focus is on uplifting and centering queer, transgender, and POC voices, with special attention to creating queer-inclusive family programming. They are a pillar of Drag Queen Story Hour, serving as director of the SF Bay Area chapter, on the Leadership Team for the national organization, and as a featured drag queen. Beatrice’s work has illuminated the audiences of the deYoung Museum, SF PRIDE Mainstage, CounterPulse, SomArts Cultural Center and KALW Radio, and has shown in galleries across the United States. Currently, they serve on the national board of directors for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals.

Yancy Villa is a socially engaged artist and civic design consultant who seeks to create awareness, engage in conversation, and encourage action on issues of social justice, equity, and community prosperity.

Having lived in third world countries and working in underserved communities in Memphis led Yancy to integrate public art, creative practices, and community planning, with a focus on neighborhood revitalization. She created Go Engage Memphis Soul (GEMS), an asset-based social practice and consultancy that works in urban planning and placemaking using art with a social equity approach while celebrating unity, diversity, and inclusion.

Her work appears in diverse forms ranging from visual art to artivism to performing art to urban planning and has been recognized by grants and commissions from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, UnidosUS, Smithsonian Latino Center, Tennessee Arts Commission, City of Memphis, UrbanArt Commission, and ArtsMemphis among others. Selected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Villa is a Mexican-American artist developing binational art initiatives for public diplomacy.

Her formal education is from Christian Brothers University and Memphis College of Art with a B.A. in Psychology, a B.F.A. in Studio Art, and an M.B.A. She holds certificates from the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts as a Creative Catalyst, UrbanArts Commission Institute at the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, MO, and the Advocacy Leadership Institute of National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures in Washington, D.C.

She serves on boards and committees of organizations, including Overton Park Conservancy, Building Memphis, ArtsMemphis, The Brooks Museum, Latino Memphis, and the LeBonheur Children’s Hospital. She is a member of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and the International Association of Art U.S.A.