Collaborators

David Boyce has been experimenting, innovating and improvising with the Broun Fellinis, an avant jazz group he co-founded for 20 years. He is a long time Bay Area musician who has explored a range of different musical genres – jazz, post rock, hip hop, world music, electronic music, and Afro funk. His music has taken him to  Europe, Japan and Canada as well as around the US. Currently, he performs with Broun Fellinis, Katdelic, The Afro Funk Experience, Black Quarterback, David Mihaly’s Shimmering Leaves Ensemble, The Supplicants, and Black Edgar’s Musik Box. David has a profound reverence for Music and a belief that we have a responsibility to honor both its tradition and its innovation.

Byb Chanel Bibene is a choreographer and performer working in theater and contemporary dance. His own technical and aesthetic sensibility is rooted in the culture and dances of his country of origin, the Republic of Congo. He has toured the world and performed internationally with companies and choreographers originating from Africa, England, France and the USA. Artistic Director of Kiandanda Dance Theater, Bibene launched Mbongui Square, a multidisciplinary arts event that gathers artists from the Bay Area and around the world. Outside of his professional careers of Theater and Dance, Bibene owns a Bachelor in Science, Economics/Finance and has a passion for writing. He received his MFA in Dance at Saint Mary’s College of California in 2018. For more info, visit www.kiandanda-dance.com.

Regina Y. Evans is the owner of Regina‘s Door, an Oakland based social enterprise vintage clothing store which operates as a creative arts healing space for survivors of sex trafficking. Regina‘s Door was named 2015 Social Changemaker, Oakland Indie Awards, 2016 Nancy’s Hero (Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley), and received a 2017 Oakland City Council Commendation in celebration of Small Business Week. As a Modern Day Abolitionist, Ms. Evans is a member of the AC United Council, and the CSEC Program Council/Claire’s House Safehouse (Catholic Charities). She was honored to be a speaker and delegate at the 2017 United Nations 61st Commission on the Status of Women.

Ms. Evans is an award winning social justice poet, playwright, costumer and performer. Her stage play 52 Letters, which brings awareness to the fight against modern day slavery, was honored to win a Best of SF Fringe Festival Award, 2013. 52 Letters is currently in residence for Live Arts In Residence (a collaboration between NAKA Dance Theater and EastSide Arts Alliance, Oakland, Ca). Ms. Evans is the Creative Director and Costumer for CEREMONY a theatrical ritual troupe bringing healing to survivors of sex trafficking, and a member of House Full Of Black Women (A multi site performance ritual project that addresses the displacement, well being and sex trafficking of Black girls and women.)

Ms Evans is honored to be a board member for Gritty City Repertory Youth Theatre and The Lower Bottom Playaz.

Stephanie Anne Johnson is a second-generation theatre practitioner whose mother, Virginia E. Greene worked with the American Negro Theater in the late 1940s. Johnson has been a lighting designer working locally, nationally, and internationally for forty-five years. Locally, she has worked with Cultural Odyssey, Afro Solo, Ubuntu Theatre Project, Marin Theatre Company, Lower Bottom Playaz, and many other groups.

Johnson is also a visual artist who has had two one-person shows in San Francisco. She has written and performed a one-person show entitled Every Twenty One Days: Cancer, Yoga, and Me. Dr. Johnson is a professor and founding faculty member of the Visual and Public Art Department at Cal State University, Monterey Bay.

Her work can be seen at www.lightessencedesign.com.

Ernest Jolly is a visual, installation artist, curator and preparator whose practice addresses the overlapping social, spatial, and technological systems affecting the industrial city and nature through time, projecting a critical and aspirational view of potential futures. He creates dynamic environments through sculptural forms, video/sound installation, and collaboration with performers. Originally from Cleveland, this Oakland-based artist has an MFA from Mills College. He has exhibited his work at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and Gallery 555 for the Oakland Museum of California.

Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen is a curator, project-based artist, and consultant for artists and cultural entrepreneurs. A San Francisco native, having over 15 years of in-depth experience in the arts, including 10+ years in the commercial gallery world and a number of years with Bay Area folkloric performance companies, Rhiannon has recently focused on projects that push boundaries of scale, scope, medium, venue, and content. In 2013 she founded A Simple Collective: an organization dedicated to fostering creative independence for professionals, and professional independence for creatives, and ASC Projects: an experimental project space in the Mission.Deeply involved with several community-building, cultural, and arts marketing organizations, she spearheaded the creation and curation of Yerba Buena Night: the free outdoor arts festival in downtown San Francisco, now in its fourth year and is on the Advisory Board for WEAD (Women’s Environmental Artist Directory) and Curatorial Committee for Root Division. She has curated exhibitions at Visual Aid Gallery, the New Media Lounge at Yerba Buena Night, ASC Projects, and SCOPE New York, and her shows and words have been included is The New Asterisk Magazine, SFArts.org, Art Practical, and KQED, among other publications.

Latanya d. Tigner has performed professionally with Dimensions Dance Theater since 1986, and has studied and toured nationally and internationally, performing multidisciplinary works rooted African diasporic dance forms.  Latanya holds a B.A. in Physical Education/Dance, a Master’s Degree in Arts Administration, directs Dimensions’ youth company, teaches dance at UC Berkeley.  Latanya has created commissioned works for Dimensions Dance Theater, Black Choreographers Festival, Robert Moses’ Kin, Mills College, and has presented work in SF Ethnic Dance Festival, Cuba Caribe, and Mabina Dance Festival (Congo-Brazzaville).  She has also set choreography for Cal Shakes’ production of black odyssey, SF Shakespeare’s production of A Winter’s Tale, Ubuntu Theater’s production of Dance of the Holy Ghost, Delina Brooks’ An Open Love Letter to Black Fathers, Contra Costa College’s productions of In the Blood, For Colored Girls, and Godspell, and Li Smith’s production of Purlie Victorious.  Her current research includes New Orleans Second Line parading traditions and West and Central African retention in African American dance forms.  Latanya also holds the position of Co-Artistic Director of World Arts West’s esteemed San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival along with Mahealani Uchiyama and Patrick Makuakane for the 2018-2020 seasons. 

 

Thuy Tran is a Bay Area-based artist and experience curator and when she’s not cooking and eating, she’s writing and acting with Granny Cart Gangstas, an Asian American female comedy sketch group. She co-founded The Rooted Recipes Project in 2018 to reflect on the ways that food has played a role in AAPI identity and resistance. She is part of the 2019 cohort of APAP’s Emerging Leadership Institute, a 2017 YBCA Public Imagination Fellow and 2016 EAP Fellow with Emerging Arts Professionals SF/BA. She is the inaugural recipient of the Ebony McKinney Emerging Arts Leadership Award in 2018.