Sanford Biggers, keynote

Sanford Biggers is a visual artist producing paintings, sculptures, immersive installations and video.  Biggers also creates multimedia musical performances with his collective Moon Medicin.  He freely combines each of these media into compelling, sensual and witty works that become a platform from which to discuss challenging and far-ranging topics like pop culture, politics, history and humanity.  He has shown his work in venues worldwide including Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, the Whitney Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and his works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Bronx Museum.  Born and raised in LA, Biggers currently lives and works in NYC, where he is Associate Professor at Columbia University's Visual Arts program.

http://sanfordbiggers.com/

Bryce Detroit

For the past five years, Bryce Detroit has led an intergenerational charge to “bridge the gap” between Detroit’s legendary musical pioneers and the city’s young emergent innovators.  In 2012, Bryce Detroit teamed with legendary Motown arranger Paul Riser to co-direct and host the Red Bull Music Academy presents Motown to New York City: Paul Riser & Friends w/Young Guru.

In 2014, he produced the ONE MILE Mothership Launch: Legacy of Funk concert with funk legend Carl ‘Butch’ Jones, bringing together four generations of Parliament-Funkadelic alumni.  In 2015, he produced the Apex of Funk, reactivating the historic Apex Bar with world-class live music for the first time in nearly two decades.

Bryce Detroit is the pioneer of Entertainment Justice and 21stCenturyHipHop. As a culture creator, he is a national award-winning music producer and curator.  As co-founder of Detroit Afrikan Music Institution, he uses entertainment arts and community cultural legacies to promote new Afrikan and Indigenous narratives, cultural literacies and new, cooperative music economies.

He grows intersectional cooperative communities as director of cultural programming for Center for Community Based Enterprise Detroit (C2BE), cultural delegate for East Michigan Environmental Action Council and as a founding member of Oakland Avenue Artists Coalition and Detroit Future Youth Network.

https://vimeo.com/147798449

Isra El-beshir

Isra El-beshir is the Curator of Education and Public Programming at the Arab American National Museum. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Cultural Anthropology from Wayne State University in 2013 and a Bachelors of Business Administration from Grand Valley State University. Isra's research focused on tropes of identity and belonging within Muslim and Arab American communities in regards to citizenship, decoloniality and critical race theory. She is an adjunct teacher in the department of Anthropology at Oakland Community College and Northwood University.

Lisa Luevanos

Lisa Luevanos is an artist, activist and educator based in Southwest Detroit.  She captures the history, culture and daily interactions of the beautiful and diverse communities of Metropolitan Detroit through her vivid, provocative images.  Her work has been exhibited throughout the state of Michigan and has appeared in a variety of magazines, newspapers, websites and other publications.  Her public art projects beautify the Southwest Detroit community she calls home.  Lisa’s work has also appeared in Ford World, Diversity Inc. Magazine, Elmore Magazine, African American Family Magazine, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, Soul-Patrol.com, Metro Times, and MTV.com.   Luevanos is passionate about helping young people and giving back to Southwest Detroit’s community that nurtured her.  She returns the gift of art via the camera to Detroit’s youth by mentoring in arts programs and working with community organizations such as, Focus: Hope and El Arte Museuo del Norte. With CLAVE and the Community of Latino Artists, Visionaries and Educators, Lisa was a grantee to create a mosaic mural in the Springwells Viaduct and entry to Southwest Detroit.  She has also created mosaic murals in Clark Park and on the LASED Building on Scotten and Vernor Highway.

http://lisaluevanos.com

Chace "Mic Write" Morris

Chace “Mic Write” Morris is a poet, emcee and educator from Detroit.  He is a 2015 Knight Arts Challenge Winner, 2013 Kresge Literary Fellow, 2-time Rustbelt Poetry Slam champion, writer-in-residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Program and 1/4 of the Hip-Hop collective Cold Men Young.  Morris has been featured on Mother Jones and The Grio, his music shared on such popular sites as The Smoking Section and Fashionably Early, and his poetry published or forthcoming in Freezeray Press, Radius and Muzzle Poetry Journal.  He is the recipient of the Detroit Institute of Art's 2016 Alain Locke Award.

http://micwriteyoulisten.com/

Gina Reichert

Gina Reichert works as an artist and designer based in Detroit, MI.  She is partner in the design and art duo Design 99 with her husband, Mitch, specializing in sustainable residential design and installation art.   Although Gina still considers herself an architect, she prefers the hands on satisfaction of transforming spaces and structures through direct and limited means.  She can often be found developing new strategies and ideas for interventions or self-initiated projects in her immediate neighborhood, defining opportunity in overlooked spaces and using the resources at hand.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Gina Reichert holds Master of Architecture degrees from both Cranbrook Academy of Art and Tulane University, and has worked for architecture firms and community organizations in Cincinnati, New Orleans, New York and Detroit.  As an artist she has earned grants and awards from Kresge Foundation, Art Prize, and Creative Capital. As Co-Director of Power House Productions she has facilitated work in her Detroit neighborhood with funding ranging from ArtPlace, to the Robert Rauschenberg and Tony Hawk Foundations. Reichert has lectured and exhibited extensively including Van Abbemuseum, Smart Museum, Structures for Inclusion conference, and the National Building Museum.

http://www.visitdesign99.com/  
http://www.powerhouseproductions.org/