A tireless advocate for girls and women, Michele Byrd-McPhee is the founder and Executive Director of Ladies of Hip-Hop. A non-profit organization empowering girls and women through Hip-Hop culture and arts. Michele has been working for decades to re-contextualize spaces and conversations about Hip-Hop culture along gender, sex, cultural, socio-historical and racial lines. As well as, situating Black dance forms, theories, dance techniques and the value of the lived artistic experience, in spaces that honor and acknowledge cultural roots along with the many creative pioneers who have shaped them. This is especially important given the ways in which Black dance has been co-opted, appropriated without acknowledgement to its community cultural origins.

Byrd-McPhee earned her BS from Temple University & an MS in Nonprofit Arts Management from Drexel University.  Michele also worked  many years in TV and arts production, working as a production coordinator at Brooklyn Academy of Music and then as a Senior Music Coordinator at Late Night with Seth Meyers. Michele currently is teaching Marketing for the Arts and Arts Advocacy at Texas Tech University. Michele is honored to have served as a Bessie Award Committee Member.

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Maimouna Youssef (Mumu Fresh) is a GRAMMY-Nominated, Indigenous Music award-winning, Musical Ambassador for the US State Department, elected governor of The DC Chapter of The Recording Academy & an Ambassador of The Black Music Collective.

Mumu Fresh has toured internationally as a critically acclaimed Afro-Indigenous singer, Emcee, songwriter, activist, workshop facilitator and audio engineer who’s been called a “quadruple threat” by The Roots’ Black Thought and “groundbreaking” by Oscar-winning artist, Common.

In 2021, Maimouna partnered with AFROPUNK x Netflix to illuminate and celebrate Black women muses and was the voice behind the ACLU Systematic Equality campaign. In 2020, she was asked to lend her soulful voice to the ESPYs tribute to Black Lives because WE Matter. Some of her other standout moments in 2020 include her contribution to Salaam Remi’s album “Black On Purpose”, along with their single “EMOGs” which surpassed 2 million streams on Spotify alone upon release in 2020. She hit the ground running in 2021 with her viral feature on Tobe Nwigwe’s song “Tundah Fiyah” from their album “Cincoriginals” which immediately surpassed one (1) million views on Instagram on release day.

Maimouna has performed to sold-out audiences, in renowned venues around the world, electrifying stages alongside countless musical giants including Common, The Roots, Sting, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Billy Ray Cyrus, MC Lyte, Brandy, Femi Kuti, Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Raphael Saadiq, Nas, Burna Boy, the National Symphony Orchestra and Dave Chappelle. Her soul-stirring performances stole the show at the Black Girls Rock Awards 2019 and Black Music Honors 2019 and 2021. She’s rocked stages at acclaimed music festivals including the Essence Music Festival, Global Citizen, and SXSW

Maimouna recently landed a lead role in Black Thought’s upcoming Broadway musical “Black No More”, which will premiere in 2022. In 2019, Maimouna performed alongside thespian legends Lynn Whitfield and Joe Morton at the Apollo Theater for a dramatic reading of Ta Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”, produced by Kamilah Forbes. In addition to her musical appearances in the films “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party” and “Girls Trip”, her music has been featured in the TV shows Queen Sugar and Being Mary Jane. She is the voice of Ford Motor Company’s “Roll On” commercial, which celebrates women of color. She has received worldwide praise for her viral NPR Tiny Desk performance addressing gender inequities and women’s rights amongst other pertinent social issues. She has shared her story of Afro-Native artistic and philanthropic excellence appearing on MSNBC, FOX 45, NPR, CNN, Cooking with Chef JJ on Cleo TV, Sway In The Morning and Al Jazeera.

Mumu Fresh has released 2 solo LPs, 2 group LPs, 1 solo EPs, 1 Mixtape, and countless singles and features with super producers such as Dj Jazzy Jeff, Salaam Remi, DJ Dummy & 9th Wonder. While touring 6 of the 7 continents, Mumu Fresh has built a relationship with over 200K engaged fans on social media who have shared and streamed her music millions of times in at least 92 countries throughout the world. Mumu Fresh’s music and philanthropic endeavours have been featured in publications such as Variety, Ebony, Essence, BET & more.

Maimouna has served as a mentor for several GRAMMY U affiliated young aspiring artists. In 2020, she founded her own online music education platform called “Muniversity Studies” to teach aspiring artists how to reimagine the music business and thrive independently with purpose. Mumu Fresh is quickly becoming known as an independent music mogul for her generation. Maimouna is committed to ‘Art Activism’ and has performed within the US prison system, Congressional Black Caucus, I.M.A.N. Central in Chicago, The W. K. Kellogg Foundation and more, bringing awareness to important social issues. Mumu Fresh is a global citizen, musical healer, cultural philanthropist and community pillar.

Maimouna “Mumu Fresh” Youssef has a very diverse and expansive musical background ranging from Jazz, Gospel, Spirituals, traditional African & traditional Indigenous music, to Hip Hop, Soul, rock and experimental acapella fusion. Maimouna has a passion for activism and community service. She has donated much of her time and platform to increased awareness & education around race and gender inequity, environmental justice and independence for artists.

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Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Director) is the 1999 National Poetry Slam champion, the 2011 Alpert Award winner in Theater and one of 21 artists to be named to the inaugural class of Doris Duke Artists in 2012. He is the founding Program Director of the exemplary non-profit Youth Speaks, and is a co-founder of Life is Living, a national series of one day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks and a peaceful urban life through hip hop arts and focused environmental action. Spiritrials is the latest piece he’s directed with Youth Speaks/Campo Santo having most recently helmed Chasing Mehserle and Mirrors in Every Corner by Chinaka Hodge and Dennis Kim’s Tree City Legends to acclaim. Mr. Joseph is currently completing new works for Creative Time, the Philadelphia Opera, the Chautauqua Symphony and South Coast Repertory Theater while serving as Chief of Program and Pedagogy at Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. bamuthi.com/@bamuthi

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Darl Andrew Packard (Lighting Designer) is a Bay Area lighting and video designer who is also the co-founder of Collage Theater (www.collagetheater.com). He is incredibly excited to be making this project his lighting debut with The Living Word Project’s Spiritrials. His video design work has been seen in collaboration with Collage Theater, Amara Tabor-Smith/Ase Dance, and Jayne Wenger’s Winter Bear Project. His lighting credits include collaboration with Killing My Lobster, Wolfgang Wachalovsky, Megan Finlay/ Rapid Descent, Laura Arrington Dance, FACT SF and Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior among others. He has previously served as the production stage manager for Josh Kornbluth’s Citizen Josh, the Touring Technical Director for Word for Word Performing Arts, and the Theater Manager at CounterPULSE. He has apprenticed with Bay Area designers David Szlasa and Allen Wilner, and served as Technical Director on Living Word Project’s red, black and GREEN; a blues by Marc Bamuthi Joseph.

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Ian Macaulay is a guitarist, composer, and producer originally from Woonsocket, RI. Over the past 15 years, Ian has made a name for himself in the Philadelphia r&b and jazz scene, performing and recording with John Legend, Estelle, and Eric Roberson, as well as jazz artists Clark Terry, Ray Vega and Joe Lovano.

Recently, Ian was featured on Brent White’s album Broken Toy, which also featured pianist Orrin Evans and bassist Luques Curtis, as well as on drummer Wayne Smith, Jr’s soon-to-be-released debut album, for which he also served as mixing engineer. Ian is also a member of the band Maiden Seoul, who just released the first single, Verve, from their debut album, Cinematic, set to be released in the spring.

In between maintaining a busy touring schedule, Ian is also getting ready to release his first record as a leader, which will show off his diverse range of influences, from jazz to R&B and progressive rock.

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Journeying To Justice In Global Prisons

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Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project

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Robert Davies (Physicist/Educator) A physicist and educator at Utah State University, Rob’s work focuses on global environmental change, sustainable human systems, and critical science communication ― which is to say, scientific storytelling for critically important stories. His unique position is jointly sponsored by USU's College of Science, the Caine College of the Arts, and the USU Ecology Center. Rob has served as an officer and meteorologist in the U.S. Air Force, worked for NASA on the International Space Station project, and taught on the faculty of three universities. His scientific work has included research into interactions of spacecraft with the space environment, the fundamental nature of light and information, and Earth's changing climate.

Laura Kaminsky (Composer: Rising Tide) is a composer with "an ear for the new and interesting" whose works are "colorful and harmonically sharp-edged" (The New York Times) and whose "musical language is compounded of hymns, blues, and gestures not unlike Shostakovich's" (inTune). Social and political themes are common in her work, as is an abiding respect for and connection to the natural world. The visual is made manifest in sound, with color and image often serving as the underlying inspiration.

Libby Larsen (Composer: Emergence) is one of America’s most performed living composers. She has created a catalogue of over 500 works spanning virtually every genre from intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral works and over 15 operas. Grammy award-winning and widely recorded, she is constantly sought after for commissions and premieres by major artists, ensembles, and orchestras around the world, and has established a permanent place for her works in the concert repertory. Larsen believes, "Music exists in an infinity of sound. I think of all music as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the composer’s task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate something about being alive through music."

Rebecca Allan (Visual Artist) is a New York-based painter whose work centers on landscape and themes of music. Rivers, tributaries, and coastal regions of the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and northern England are the artist's primary sites of investigation and inspiration. Exhibited nationally and abroad for more than 25 years, Allan's work attempts to express, in abstract and painterly terms, the fragility of our ecosystems, and the unpredictability of nature’s cycles.

Garth Lenz (Photographer) is an internationally renowned environmental photographer who examines contrasts between the industrialized and natural landscape. The range of his photographic subjects has included the impacts of industrial logging on forests, and the world of modern fossil fuel production and its associated impacts on the landscape. Recent projects have addressed mountaintop removal coal mining, shale gas production, and the Alberta Tar Sands. His work has appeared in leading editorial publications including, Time, GEO, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times.

Jeff Counts (Production Manager) is General Manager of the Grand Tetons Music Festival, and past General Manager of the Utah Symphony. He has worked in performing arts planning and logistics for over 15 years and previously spent 6 years as an elementary school educator in his home state of Florida. Jeff speaks and writes about music frequently and provides concert annotation and program articles for orchestras and opera companies around the country. When not focused on music, Jeff enjoys a second life as a pop culture commentator and film critic and appears weekly on the regional television program "Big Movie Mouth-Off.”

Learn more about Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project.

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Matthew Burtner (Composer) is an Alaskan-born composer, sound artist and eco-acoustician whose work explores embodiment, ecology, polytemporality and noise. His music has been performed in concerts around the world and featured by organizations such as NASA, PBS NewsHour, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the BBC, the U.S. State Department under President Obama, and National Geographic. He has published three intermedia climate change works including the IDEA Award-winning telematic opera, Auksalaq. In 2020 he received an Emmy Award for “Composing Music with Snow and Glaciers” a feature on his Glacier Music by Alaska Public Media. His music has also received international honors and awards from the Musica Nova (Czech Republic), Bourges (France), Gaudeamus (Netherlands), Darmstadt (Germany), and The Russolo (Italy) international music competitions. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award for The Ceiling Floats Away, a large-scale collaborative work with US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Rita Dove. Burtner holds the position of Eleanor Shea Professor of Music at the University of Virginia (www.virginia.edu) where he Co-Directs the Coastal Future Conservatory (http://www.coastalconservatory.org). He also is founder and director of the Alaska-based environmental music non-profit organization EcoSono (www.ecosono.org). His new album Icefield is out now on Ravello Records.

Burtner’s compositions bring performers and listeners into interactive relationships with the environment through the use of musical ecoacoustics, a field he pioneered in the 1990s to imbed environmental energy within musical forms. Born and raised in Alaska, Burtner experienced the early dire effects of global warming in his home and he dedicated his early musical exploration to the study of snow, ice, ocean and atmosphere, examining the acute impacts of global warming through sound and music. National Public Radio’s Here on Earth’s’ Jean Ferraca described his work as “Fog, Ice, Snow, Cold, Sand, Lava, Wind: These are the elements out of which sound artist Matthew Burtner creates his eerily effective electroacoustic soundscapes, music that draws from both beauty and horror. He calls his music ecoacoustics. I say it’s the world song.” He studied music as a field in close dialog with science and technology, a blend of scientific inquiry, engineering and imaginative aesthetic expression that applies scientific methods as new forms of music theory. New York’s New Music Box wrote that his music is “totally unique, compelling music that is directly influenced by the natural world.” Burtner’s music has been performed in over 600 concerts over the past decade. Reviewers have responded favorably to the intermedia and interactive experience of these performances. For example, Donostilandia in San Sebastian, Spain writes, “The works of Burtner expand music beyond sonic materials… pieces in which the shifting slip of an ice crystal, or tracks in the snow-covered ground, or transforming spheres, or the shakings of leaves extend the mental impressionist landscape of sound …The concert in its totality acts as a parenthesis of perceptive suspension for the listener, an immersion in a sonorous and visual reality of fractals, beautiful, like the color of a thought.” And Sonhors Magazine from France writes about his work, “This audio-visual experience is mesmerizing and subliminal. Burtner plays with beauty, coolness and space; halfway between chamber music and sound sculpture.” His discography includes six solo music albums, starting with Portals of Distortion (1999) up to the most recent releases Avian Telemetry/Six Ecoacoustic Quintets (2020), Glacier Music (2019), and Icefield (2022).
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Burtner is the composer of three evening-length intermedia environmental opera/theater works — Ukiuq Tulugaq (Winter Raven), Kuik, and Auksalaq. Auksalaq, created in collaboration with percussionist and media artist Scott Deal, blended intermedia music with politics, science and technology in unprecedented ways. Auksalaq (2010) was the first climate change opera and the first telematic opera, a collaborative work that brought together artists and musicians, scientists, politics and innovative technology. In 2019 the piece was presented by National Geographic who also reviewed the premiere performance in 2012 writing, “Auksalaq is a significant cultural event that marries science as the brain, art as the heart and culture as the soul in our search for awareness and sustainability. Auksalaq can be a political and social driver that will accelerate response to climate disruption. (Michael McBride)” Following a performance in New York at NYU, Joel Chadabe, Director of the Electronic Music Foundation wrote: “Auksalaq is the single best and most important realization of meaningful opera for today’s world that I have heard in decades of producing events in New York and elsewhere. It is a pioneering work that pushes the boundaries of networked, media- enriched performance. It weaves together multiple narratives relating to global climate change into a powerful, evocative, and multi-faceted story, presenting different perspectives in the ways in which we view the world through a variety of media… In its relevance to today’s world, in its theatrical multiple-media presentation, in the ways in which it brings humanity together with technology, it is a remarkable work and an example of how opera may and should evolve today.”
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A 2010/2011 Provost Fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies at UWM, Burtner has also conducted long-term residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), Phonos Foundation/Pompeu Fabra Universidad (Spain), Musikene (Spain), Cite des Arts (France), IRCAM/Centre Pompidou (France), the University of Missouri Kansas City (USA), and the Anchorage Museum (USA). He studied composition, computer music, saxophone and philosophy at St. Johns College in Santa Fe, Tulane University (BFA) in New Orleans, Iannis Xenakis’s UPIC-Studios in Paris, the Peabody Institute/Johns Hopkins (MM) in Baltimore, and Stanford University/CCRMA (DMA) in California.