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| Desdamona, Spoken
Word and Performance desdamona.dunation.com princessofthepoemdesdamona.blogspot.com Desdamona is a spoken word artist who has distinguished herself with her potent poetry and MC-style rhymes. Performing since 1997, Desdamona has been on some of the most prestigious stages for poetry slams in the country, including the legendary Green Mill in Chicago, the Nuyorican Poet’s Café in New York City, and the National Slam Competition. She was a member of the 2000 SlamMN! Poetry Slam Team, and in 2002 Desdamona was one of four female poets who performed throughout California in the Bustin’ Out Tour. In 2003 Desdamona was invited to perform on the Jenny Jones Show to an audience of young women, a show that was aired several times in 2003. Desdamona received the Minnesota Music Award for Best Spoken Word Artist in 2000, 2003 and again in 2004. Desdamona often teaches workshops in the schools, at Stillwater Prison, and is now going into her fourth year of producing the Encyclopedia of Hip-hop Evolution, a quarterly workshop and performance series at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. |
 Photograph by Jessica Pursley. Photo courtesy of Zlink Entertainment. |
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| Leah Nelson,
Dance and Performance Leah Nelson is a Zimbabwean dancer, choreographer and producer who graduated from North Carolina School of the Arts. She has performed internationally from Brussels to Brazil, and extensively throughout the US with dance/theater company David Rousseve/REALITY. Her recent performance abroad was a solo at the opening night celebration for the Zanzibar International Film Festival in July 2004. She premiered her McKnight Dance Fellow solo "YOUR place" a dance/ theater piece choreographed by London-based artist Jonzi D which explores racial identity using words, hip-hop and modern dance elements. Leah directed the piece Sleeping Gods; Theater in the Spirit of Hip-Hop for the PS 122 production of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival in 2000 and curated Hip-Hop Moves : Heroes and Innovators for the Walker Art Center's Hip-Hop Dance Festival in October 2003. She is a co-founder of MN Spoken Word Association and is currently active as a Teaching Artist in schools. Leah is Artistic Director of Nubia a pan hip-hop performing arts collective and believes in creating art by any means necessary. |
 Photograph
by Mark Walentiny |
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DeAnna
D. Cummings (Juxtaposition Arts), Visual Arts |
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| Rachel Raimist,
Film/Video and Panel Discussion blog.lib.umn.edu/raim0007/RaeSpot Rachel Raimist is filmmaker, scholar, educator, hip-hop feminist, activist, community organizer, and mother. She is most known for her documentary Nobody Knows My Name, distributed by Women Make Movies, about women in hip-hop and as the Videographer/Editor of the award-winning films Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme and Estilo Hip Hop. Currently, she is filming Central Touring Theater at Central High School in St. Paul. She has written and photographed for The Source, URB, Remix, and The Amsterdam News. Her work has been written about in The Village Voice, Spin, LA Weekly, City Pages, and Jane and she has appeared on The Jenny Jones Show, 60 Minutes, and on numerous international radio shows and national news outlets. Rachel received her B.A. and M.F.A in Film Directing from the UCLA School of Film and Television. She has taught video production at the University of California, Irvine and Los Angeles, and women of color/third wave activism as a Visiting Instructor in the Women and Gender Studies Program at Macalester College. Currently, she is pursuing her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. |
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by Greg Page Studios |
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| Melisa
Rivière, Graf Melisa Rivière is a first generation Latina born to Argentinean parents on one of those April snowstorms that reinforces winter’s refusal to leave Minnesota. She was raised bilingual and bicultural between Minneapolis and Buenos Aires. Melisa became artistically and academically involved first with graffiti and later the other elements of Hip-hop. She wrote her Baccalaureate thesis Art Graffiti; A Cultural Analysis of Graffiti and Twin Cities’ Guerrilla Artist and her Master’s Thesis Graffiti as a Social Resistance Movement: Research, Methods, and Ethics conducting fieldwork in Minneapolis, New York and Puerto Rico. Today Melisa continues her graduate studies in Anthropology. She received video production training in Havana, Cuba as a team documentalist in conjunction with the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry working on a film titled Revolutionary Cubanas. She retired her photographic camera for digital video and is now completing her Ph.D. as a MacArthur Scholar at the University of Minnesota on the four elements of hip-hop in Cuba and Puerto Rico. She has worked with artists from In The house Magazine, Songo Sounds, Time Machine Squad, White Lion Records, The Cuban Agency for Rap, and the Hermanos Saíz Association filming hip-hop conferences, documentaries, festivals, live performances and music video clips with Anónimo Consejo, Tego Calderon, Doble Filo, MC Hyde, Obsesion, RCH and Yimi Konclaze. As owner and president of Emetrece Productions, Inc. she has expanded her academic work as a young entrepreneur in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Melisa continues her solidarity work producing self-financed and donation based video production to Cuban artists and taking much needed materials to the Cuban Hip-hop movement in Havana. |
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by Greg Page Studios |
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| Ashley Gold has been writing creatively since she was seven years old. She has performed at the Blue Nile, Acadia Coffee Shop, Intermedia Arts, and at open mics around the Twin Cities. Some of Ashley’s musicial influences are India Arie, Lauyrn Hill, and Ani DiFranco. Ashley has been described as a natural talent who has an innocence about her approach, but carries a powerful voice and is also a creative songwriter. Ashley started performing a year ago but prior to that she has hosted and organized events at the Garage Youth Center. She is currently pursuing a degree in Social Work and Youth Studies at the University of Minnesota. She has worked with youth for over five years including facilitating young women’s groups at The Garage, and at The Bridge for Runaway Youth. Ashley continues to combine her passion for youth work with her passion for music. |  |
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Amphavanh
Inthisone is a 22 year old, Laotian American, single mother,
manicurist, film editing assistant and artist who lives in Minneapolis.
She comes from a family of artists and experiments with visual art, and
all the elements of the hip hop culture. She has worked with “In
The Belly” on the “Inside/Outside Joint” documentary,
featuring inmates at Stillwater prison. She has also exhibited her visual
artwork at The Soo Vac, IMA, and the Walker Art Center. Amphavanh uses
creativity to ease her mind and create change within herself and her community.
She is always trying to find a positive movement through her artwork to
help others. |
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| Phira Sun-Vargas holds an A.A.S. in Business Administration from the Minnesota School of Business. She is an experienced arts administrator, youth worker, visual artist, activist and emerging leader in social justice. In 1999, Phira founded the non-profit organization, Khmer’s Next Generation. The organization focused on closing the generation gap between elders and youths in the South East Asian community. At the age of sixteen, Phira started as a student artist in Juxtaposition’s Studio Arts Program. Since then she has participated in the NAACP mural project, depicting social justice within the city of Minneapolis’s public school system. She has also collaborated with the United Cambodian Association of Minnesota, the Arts Us program at Concordia College, and Pillsbury Neighborhood Services, working with youth in the Twin Cities on various mural projects and theater productions. Currently, Phira is an Administrative and Artistic Associate at Juxtaposition Arts in North Minneapolis. In addition to this, she is an illustrator and writer for the Minneapolis Liberator. For Phira, art has always been a tool for expression and a process through which she can achieve freedom from oppression and criticism. She uses her art to create a dialog about the issues in society that people tend to sweep under the rug, in hopes of initiating change and inspiration for herself and others. |  |
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| Sarah White is
a regular renaissance woman. She started performing at a young age and has
been on stage ever since. She has taken an interest in almost every art
form you can imagine from dance to visual art—theater to music. Her
career in hip-hop began at the age of 14—with poetry and gradually
moving towards rhyming. In the winter of 2001, Sarah became a part of the
live hip-hop band, Traditional Methods. With the group, she has opened for
Medusa, Fishbone, Camp-Lo, Juvenile and local hip-hop heavyweights, Eyedea,
Brother Ali and Heiruspecs. With two releases, the most recent being the
full length “Falling Forward”, Sarah is now envisioning a solo
project and also focusing on getting back into her other artistic interests.
Inspiration comes from a variety of places and people including Stevie Wonder,
Bahamadia, Bjork, and Erykah Badu. She is drawn to these artists because
of their freedom to express their passion and share their soul through music.
Sarah hopes to inspire people through her music the way these artists have
influenced her. Performing regionally and locally for the past three years
she has been compared to Lauryn Hill, Sade, and India Arie. So, just imagine
a combination of those three all wrapped up in one person. Quiet but powerful,
raspy and sultry, political yet affectionate—she commands the listeners
attention with a combination of rhyme and smooth melodies. If she were to
give other artists a piece of advice, it would be to stay true to your vision
and to not be afraid to dive head first into expression, while keeping it
humble. www.myspace.com/sarahwhitesoul |
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| Sandra
Agustín, Artistic Director Sandy holds a B.S. in Dance Therapy from the University of Wisconsin. Sandra has been a professional dancer and performing artist whose work has been presented at venues such as the Southern Theatre, Hennepin Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, and the Kohler Art Center. She has been Artistic Core member for Theater Mu, Minnesota’s Asian American theater company and has been adjunct faculty at Augsburg College since 1996. Ms. Agustín has worked with developmentally disabled communities, teens and pre-schoolers for over a decade and has been a guest choreographer with SteppingStone Children’s Theater in St. Paul, MN since 1997. In 1998, Sandy received a prestigious St. Paul Companies Leadership Initiatives in Neighborhoods grant to travel the United State to investigate intergenerational creativity. |
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| Theresa
Sweetland, Education & Community Programs Manager Theresa Sweetland is an experienced arts administrator, community organizer, youth worker and emerging leader in the field of community cultural development. Her passion and know-how have brought together diverse sectors of the community, artists and developers, elders and teens, prisoners and poets, to build collaborations and partnerships that expand and enrich lives and build comunity. She holds a B.A. in Social Cultural Anthropology from the University of Minnesota where she focused on urban youth culture and ownership of public land and spaces. Currently the Community and Education Programs Manager at Intermedia Arts, a position she has held since 1998, Theresa manages The Institute for Community Cultural Development, a nationally recognized leadership program that for over three years has provided professional development to 45 artists, organizers and community development professionals in the Twin Cities. In additional she has also developed Art & Activism a program dedicated to activating issues of importance to teens and their communities working with alternative high schools addressing issues most important to their students through art. |
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