City of Women II

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine will join the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. 

Fabiola Jean-Louis was born in Port Au Prince, Haiti on September 10th, 1978 and moved to Brooklyn, NY at a young age. While attending the High School of Fashion Industries, her passion for the arts flourished. Fabiola discovered her talent for photography many years later in November 2013 while on a journey of artistic rediscovery. She began taking self-portraits as a matter of convenience, shyness, and because she knew how to convey the stories she wanted to tell using her body. Later, her work grew to include other subjects and costumes, as well as sculptures made entirely out of paper. Today, her practice is focused on experimentation through the use of different techniques and disciplines. While her images have been described as "magical, moody, and mysterious," Fabiola's body of work is also that of visual activism as she challenges the hegemony of society. Her goal is always to capture something that is not necessarily tangible in our world, something that is beyond our humanity, and perhaps even greater than us. Afro-futurism, science fiction, pre- and post-industrial eras, elves, fairies, history, and folklore are also central themes in her work. Her ongoing series, Rewriting History, a three-part series consisting of period paper gowns, painterly photographs, and Polaroids, opened as a solo exhibition at Smithsonian affiliates, DuSable Museum of African American History, Alan Avery Art Company, and Andrew Freedman Home to critical acclaim. It also earned her acceptance into the highly sought-after residency at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York, and the LUX Museum, San Diego. Fabiola was invited to participate in a BRIC Media group exhibition, Bordering the Imaginary: Art from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their Diasporas. .

Toshi Reagon is a multi-talented and versatile singer, composer, musician, and curator with a profound ear for sonic Americana—from folk to funk, from blues to rock. She has collaborated with artists including Lizz Wright, Meshell Ndegeocello, Lenny Kravitz, Jason Moran, Alicia Hall Moran, Climbing PoeTree, and Nona Hendryx. As a composer for dance and theater, she has worked with Katori Hall, Urban Bush Women, The Jane Comfort Dance Co., and Dorrance Dance, with whom she created Bessie Award-winning The Blues Project. Toshi has collaborated with her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, on several operas including The Temptation of St. Anthony and Zinnias, The Life of Clementine Hunter, and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which has been performed on four continents to date. As a curator, Toshi has led the Women’s Jazz Festival at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Soul Mechanism at Carnegie Hall’s Migrations Festival, and currently presents the GOODFolk series at Joe’s Pub. Toshi has co-composed music for two Peabody Award-winning films. Her many awards include a NYFA Award for Music Composition, an OutMusic Heritage Award, and The Black Lily Music and Film Festival Award for Outstanding Performance. She is a National Women’s History Month honoree and has been named a 2015 Art of Change Fellow by the Ford Foundation, a 2018 United States Artist Fellow, and a 2018-2022 Andrew W. Mellon Creative Futures Artist-in-Residence at Carolina Performing Arts. In 2021, Toshi received the APAP Award for Merit in the Performing Arts and the Herb Alpert Award in Music. Her many recordings include The Righteous Ones, TOSHI, Have You Heard, There and Back Again and SPIRITLAND. Her latest record Beautiful World will be released in 2021.  

Daniel Alexander Jones exemplifies the artist-as-energy worker. His wildflower body of original work includes plays, performance pieces, recorded music, concerts, music theatre events, essays, and long-form improvisations. He explores the esoteric and the everyday through his own distinctive dramaturgy. Jones’s critically-acclaimed pieces include Radiate (Soho Rep and National Tour; Black Light (Public Theater, Greenwich House Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, Penumbra Theatre); Duat (Soho Rep); An Integrator’s Manual (La MaMa, etc. and Fusebox Festival). Jones has recorded six albums of original songs as his alter-ego, Jomama Jones. Daniel’s current project, www.aten.life, significantly expands his digital media presence. Jones directed world-premieres of new plays and performance pieces by E. Patrick Johnson, Erik Ehn, Renita Martin, and Shay Youngblood, among others. Jones was honored with the PEN America Laura Pels Foundation Theatre Award in 2021. He was a 2020 TED Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, a Doris Duke Artist Award, an Alpert Award in the Arts, a USA Artist Fellowship, an Arts Matters grant, an inaugural Creative Capital Grant, a McKnight National Residency and Commission, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a NEA/TCG Playwriting Residency, a Jerome Fellowship, and a Many Voices Playwriting Fellowship. Jones received a Bistro Award for Outstanding Performance Artistry for Jomama Jones, and a Franky Award from the Prelude Festival in recognition of long-term, extraordinary impact on contemporary theatre and performance. He is a widely respected, innovative educator who has taught across the United States and held faculty positions at Goddard College, The University of Texas at Austin, and most recently at Fordham University, where he is a Full Professor in the Department of Theatre and Visual Arts.