Toshi Reagon is a multi-talented and versatile singer, composer, musician, curator, and producer with a profound ear for sonic Americana. Her expansive career includes residencies at Carnegie Hall, the Paris Opera House, and multiple festivals and venues nationally and internationally. A highly collaborative artist, she has worked with many musicians, choreographers, film, and theater makers, including Meshell Ndegeocello, Urban Bush Women, Dorrance Dance, Nona Hendryx, Carl Hancock Rux, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Robert Wilson, and her band BIGLovely. Toshi co-composed music for two Peabody Award- winning films. She is a 2015 Art of Change Fellow by the Ford Foundation. A 2018 United States Artist Fellow, and an Andrew W. Mellon Creative Futures Fellow Carolina Performing Arts. In 2021, Toshi received the APAP Award for Merit in the Performing Arts and was a 2021 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Music. In 2011 she founded the Community festival Word*Rock*& Sword. Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon created the opera Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, on tour Spring/Summer 2023.

J. Bob Alotta is a veteran movement builder and nonprofit executive working at the intersection of technology and communities, and currently serving as Vice President, Global Programs at Mozilla Foundation. Prior to Mozilla, Bob led the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice.

Alsarah is a singer, songwriter, bandleader and a somewhat reluctant ethnomusicologist. Born in Khartoum, Sudan, she relocated to Yemen with her family before abruptly moving to the USA, finally feeling most at home in Brooklyn, NY. She is a self-proclaimed practitioner of East-African Retro-Pop music. She has toured both nationally and internationally. With her main outfit, Alsarah & the Nubatones, she has released 2 full-length albums, Silt and Manara (Wonderwheel Recordings, 2014 and 2016). She has also released 1 full-length album with French electronic producer Débruit, Aljawal (Soundways Recordings, 2013). She was featured on the Nile Project‘s debut CD, Aswan (named in the top 5 must hear international albums by NPR, 2014). The Nubatones saw themselves reimagined and remixed by various acclaimed electronic producers in 2015’s Silt Remixed and 2017’s Manara Remixed (both via Wonderwheel Recordings). In between albums, Alsarah also works with the Sudanese artist collective Refugee Club Productions on a variety of projects including the critically acclaimed documentary “Beats of the Antonov.”

Carl Hancock Rux is an award winning poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, recording artist, actor, theater director, radio journalist, and frequent collaborator in the fields of film, modern dance, and contemporary art. He is a co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines and Associate Artistic Director/Curator in Residence at Harlem Stage. Recent works include The Baptism, a tribute to civil rights leaders John Lewis and C.T. Vivian, commissioned by Lincoln Center and directed by Carrie Mae Weems, I Dream a Dream that Dreams Back at Me, a site-specific Juneteenth celebration for Lincoln Center and Archer Aymes Lost and Found Retrospective: A Juneteenth Exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory. Upcoming performances: San Juan Hill: A New York Story at Geffen Hall with Etienne Charles, October 8, 2022.

Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer, author, mother, and food justice activist who has been tending the soil and organizing for an anti-racist food system for 25 years. She currently serves as founding co-ED and Farm Director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a Black & Brown led project that works toward food and land justice. Her books are Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (2018) and Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (2023). Find out more about Leah’s work at www.soulfirefarm.org and follow her @soulfirefarm on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Martha Redbone is a vocalist/songwriter/composer/educator. She is known for her music gumbo of folk, blues, and gospel from her childhood in coal country Harlan County, Kentucky, infused with the eclectic grit of pre-gentrified New York City. Inheriting the powerful vocal range of her gospel-singing African American father and the resilient spirit of her mother’s southeastern Cherokee/Choctaw culture and heritage, Redbone broadens the boundaries of American Roots music. With songs and storytelling that share her life experience as an Afro-Native American woman and mother navigating in the new millennium, Redbone gives voice to issues of social justice, connecting cultures, and celebrating the human spirit. Her latest album “The Garden of Love-Songs of William Blake” is “a brilliant collision of cultures” (New Yorker).

Redbone’s works are under her own indie label, a partnership she shares with longtime collaborator/husband Aaron Whitby. Recent composer commissions include “Belonging”- commissioned by the 2022 Moab Music festival, “A Mother’s Love”- 2021 Freshgrass Music Festival Bluegrass Concerto, “Black Mountain Calling”- a chamber music piece for cello and bass clarinet with Dave Eggars and Tasha Caterina Warren-Yehudi for 2022 University of Michigan “Jazz meets Classical” concert series, and composed for the Broadway revival of “For Colored Girls...” a choreopoem by the late Ntozake Shange, which premiered in 2022. As 2020 Drama Desk Award and 2020 Audelco Award recipient for Outstanding Composer in a Play for “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuff,” at The Public Theater, previous works include “Bone Hill: The Concert,” a multidisciplinary theatrical concert touring nationally and “Black Mountain Women,” currently in development at The Public Theater in NYC. Martha is also a 2022 United States Artist Fellow. Martha is based in Brooklyn, NY. Visit martharedbone.com

Chase Strangio is a lawyer and trans activist living in New York City. He has been counsel in some of the past decade’s most pivotal legal fights on behalf of transgender litigants including the ACLU’s challenge to North Carolina’s notorious HB2, Carcaño, et al. v. Cooper, et al, the ACLU’s challenge to Trump’s trans military ban, Stone v. Trump, the case of Aimee Stephens, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v EEOC at the Supreme Court, and recent challenges to anti-trans laws and policies in Idaho, Texas and Arkansas. He is also the co-founder of TranSanta and the Lorena Borjas Community Fund.

Maleek Washington is from the Bronx, New York. An alumni of the Boston Conservatory, where he studied on full scholarship, he began his dance training at Harlem School of The Arts, the Broadway Dance Center, and the LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts. He danced with CityDance Ensemble (Washington DC), Montreal’s SpringBoard Danse (working with Jose Navas & RUBBERBAND), and Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M, before becoming the first African American male to perform in Sleep No More. He has also performed for Sia, Phish, Rihanna, and ASAP Rocky. Maleek was part of NBC’s Jesus Christ Superstar Live. Maleek been the assistant choreographer for the Metropolitan Opera’s Grammy-winning production of Porgy and Bess, Spike Lee’s Mont Blanc commercial, and Camille A. Brown’s City of Rain with Alvin Ailey. Washington is currently the assistant choreographer for Camille A. Brown’s directorial debut of Fire Shut Up In My Bones, by Terence Blanchard, which has made history for being the first opera composed by an African American Man performed at the Metropolitan Opera.

The W.O.W. Project is a women, non-binary, and trans led, community-based initiative that works to sustain ownership over Chinatown Manhattan’s future by growing, protecting, and preserving Chinatown’s creative culture through arts, culture, and activism. Our core mission is to create space for conversations that cross-generational gaps to seed intergenerational understanding. The W.O.W. Project envisions the future of Chinatown to center young women and nonbinary youth in building intergenerational bridges of understanding, collective empowerment, and solidarity across Asian American communities and beyond. Our projects include artist residencies, youth programs and internships, public artworks and events, and mutual aid.