Artists

BARUCH “BABA” ISREAL is an emcee, poet, theater artist, and Beatboxer who has toured across the USA, Europe, Japan, Brazil, New Zealand and Australia. He co-founded the Playback NYC Theater Company and his work has been recognized and supported by the several arts councils both nationally and internationally. He has performed in Hip-Hop Commedia’s What You Say White Boy?, Full Circle’s Soular Powered, collobarated as a musician and director with numerous artists. Baba will be teaching at Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Hip Hop boot camp and with NYU’s Hip-Hop theater lab. His new solo piece Boom Bap Meditations was recently presented by Hip-Hop Theater Festival as part of Critcal Breaks, and his latest record with Yako 440 (named in URB’s prestigious NEXT 1000) is called “Beatbox Dub Poetics”. This year, as part of Lincoln Center’s Rhythm Road, he will be touring South East Asia with Dana Leong Project. Baba is currently an MFA in interdisciplinary arts candidate at Goddard College uniting his passion for Hip-Hop and Education. For more info openthoughtmusic.com

BASHI ROSE and MITCHELL FERGUSON founded The Men of Nommo In 1994. Locks & Links, a medley of poetry, music, dance, skits, and rhymes, was their first play which was produced at Theater Project and Arena Players in Baltimore. Shortly after, they partnered with Young Audiences of Maryland and performed and conducted workshops in schools throughout Maryland and D.C. In 1999, Hiphoptic Reconsruction, a short two character piece, was performed at several underground poetry and Hip-Hop venues in B-more. These performances lead to Forteez Bluntz Chickenhedz “N” Uva Necessateez, which premiered at Baltimore Theater Project in 2004 as part of the Baltimore Artscape Festival. It was later produced at Creative Alliance in Baltimore with a sound score co-produced by Andre Mcknight of Street Orchestra and the band More Dogs. In 2006, Forteez received a reading at the Schomburg Center as part the Classical Theater of Harlem’s Future Classic Series, and in 2007 was presented as part the HHTF in D.C. Its most recent production was at the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown, MD.

BEN SNYDER is a Bay Area native and a writer whose work has been presented across New York and California. A graduate of Tisch School of the Arts and former Julliard Graduate Playwriting Fellow, Ben has worked consistently as a playwright for the past several years with the Hip-Hop Theatre Festival and Center Stage New York, where he also serves as Director of the Literary Department. Among his credits are: In Case You Forget (New York Stage and Film), You Can Clap Now (HBO Comedy Arts Festival), History of the Word (The Vineyard Theater), No Salute (New York Theater Workshop), and Rock-Paper-Scissors (The Public Theater). Most recently Ben directed his play In Case You Forget with the New Africa Theatre Association in Cape Town, South Africa. As a Teaching Artist, Ben explores social issues through drama in High Schools throughout New York City.

DAN WOLF is a founding member of the Hip-Hop collective Felonious, and a Resident Artist with both the Z Space Studio and Hybrid Project at Intersection for the Arts. His play Beatbox: A Raparetta (co-authored with Tommy Shepherd) has been produced in San Francisco, Oakland, Petaluma, Germany, and at the New York Hip Hop Theater Festival. Beatbox will be published by TCG in the upcoming Hip-Hop theater anthology Plays from the Boom Box Galaxy. He is currently creating Stateless, a hip-hop and beatbox infused theatrical collaboration with Tommy Shepherd, balancing German and Jewish history with the problems of racism and the Jewish African American Experience. He is also creating a piece based on the novel Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach. As an actor, he has worked with Word for Word, Crowded Fire, Intersection for the Arts, Porchlight Theater Company, and the Shotgun Players. As an educator he has worked with Berkeley Rep School of Theater, Hybrid Institute at Intersection, and Youth Speaks.

EISA DAVIS wrote an article for the March 2000 issue of The Source which helped bring recognition to hip hop theatre as a movement and to galvanize the community of its pioneer artists. She has continued to champion hip hop theatre in the pages of Jeff Chang’s Total Chaos and in American Theatre. Eisa is the author of eight full-length plays, which include ANGELA’S MIXTAPE (Synchronicity Theater, 2008), SIX MINUTES, and UMKOVU, all of which were developed in the Hip Hop Theater Festival. Eisa is a member of New Dramatists, a graduate of Harvard and the Actors Studio/New School, and was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. As an actress, her work includes the rock musical Passing Strange (Broadway, ’08), the films Robot Stories, Happenstance (HBO), Confess, The Architect, and recurring appearances on “The Wire” and the “Law and Order” franchise. Eisa’s album of original songs, Something Else, is available on CDBaby and iTunes, and is distributed in Japan. www.myspace.com/eisadavis

GEORGE WATSKY is a 21 year old writer and performer from San Francisco by way of Boston. His one-man show, So Many Levels, has been mounted in San Francisco, Boston, Vermont, and at the Critical Breaks series of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival in New York City. He co-wrote and played Dante in the Living Word Festival’s 2005 re-imagination of Dante’s Divine Comedy at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and his first full play, The FUSE: A chain reaction, premiered in San Francisco in January, 2005. Accolades include an appearance in Def Poetry on HBO, and he is 2006 Brave New Voices National Poetry Slam Champion, 2006 Youth Speaks Grand Slam Poetry Champion, and a Robert Redford Sundance Summit award winner. George has performed at the San Francisco Opera House, the Masonic Auditorium the Apollo Theater, and at the Stern Grove Festival with the DaKah Hip Hop Orchestra. Watsky is emcee for the Hip-Hop/ jazz project Invisible Inc., a host on 889 @ Night on WERS 88.9 FM, and is an acting candidate at Emerson College.

IDRIS ACKAMOOR is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, actor, tap dancer, director, videographer and producer. He is the Founder and Executive/Co-Artistic Director of the San Francisco performance company Cultural Odyssey. Under his leadership, the company has become internationally recognized for artistic excellence. An accomplished tap dancer, Idris’ signature performance is his uncanny ability to combine tap dancing with playing his saxophone simultaneously. He is the recipient of a 2007 Center for Cultural Innovation Award Grant to support working lives of California artists. His piece The OG and the B Boy is a new Hip-Hop musical that speaks to violence reduction, conflict resolution, and intergenerational understanding. The production tells the story of a older street musician/hoffer (tap dancer) and an embittered, hard gang youth who meet on the street. After an initial potentially deadly confrontation, they engage in a series of conversations, and through stories, musical numbers, and theatrical skits, resolve their conflicts and seek new intergenerational understanding.

IDRIS GOODWIN is an award-winning playwright, director, teacher, and hip-hop and spoken word recording artist/documentarian. As a performer, he has shared the stage with renowned poets Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni, storytellers Ira Glass and Studs Terkel, and Blues Legend Billy Branch. Among his achievements, Idris has released a critically acclaimed self-titled hip-hop CD, and has received features on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, National Public Radio, and has recently been published in the 2007 Spoken Word Revolution Redux Anthology. In 2004, he was awarded a Playwright in Residence grant by the National Endowment for the Arts to explore Hip-Hop aesthetics in theater. Works with the Hip-Hop Theater Festival include, staged readings and presentations of his plays BUCKWILD and THE WOLFMAN. Recently, he served as a Hip-Hop Theater delegate at the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya. Idris currently serves as a creative media consultant and documentarian for the Interfaith Youth Core, an internationally recognized non-profit committed to inter-religious peace work facilitated by young people.

ISE LYFE is a Spoken Word artist, Emcee, and teacher. He has performed all over the country and abroad reaching as far as the United Kingdom and Ghana, West Africa. Among many of his achievements, is an appearance on the cover of City Flight Magazine where he was profiled as one of the "Top 25 Under 35 in The Bay Area." Ise also co-wrote and performed in "CAUSE", a Hip-Hop theater piece that fused spoken word with modern dance. Other performance credits include the 2001 Youth Speaks National Poetry Slam, Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on HBO, and a one-man theater piece “Who’s Krazy?,” which was curetted by Cultural Odyssey of San Francisco and debuted at the 2007 National Black Theater Festival. A businessman as well as an artist, Ise is owner, founder, and executive director of Lyfe Productives, a company invested in creating a popular culture of consciousness, and co-founder of the P.O.W.E.R. Movement, an Oakland-based organization that addresses the educational, social and political needs of young people.

J KYLE MANZAY is a native of Dallas, TX. He began his training at Howard University where he received a BFA in Theater. Upon graduation J Kyle attended NYU Graduate Acting Program where he received his MFA in acting. In the summer of 2000, J Kyle became a member of the Classical Theater of Harlem where he acted in such plays as Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet (title role), King Lear (AUDELCO Nomination Best Supporting Actor), The Blacks: A Clown Show (Obie Award for Outstanding Performance), Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (AUDELCO Nomination for Best Actor in a Musical) and Waiting for Godot (AUDELCO Nomination for Best Ensemble). J Kyle has been seen on Law & Order -SVU, CSI - NY, Little Manhattan (Twentieth Century Fox), and recently played opposite Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe in American Gangster (Universal Pictures). He has worked in New York at The Cherry Lane Theater, New York Theater Workshop, and Lincoln Center.

KENICHI EBINA is a solo, self-taught, multiple style dance performer who started dancing Hip-Hop in 1994 and has been expanding his ability to many different styles of dance, mime, circus acts, illusion and directing. He has presented his solo performances at many events, TV shows and teaching opportunities throughout USA, Europe and Japan. Along with performing, Kenichi has also directed and choreographed for many projects and dance and theater companies. In 2001, Kenichi founded dance group, BiTriP. BiTriP became the grand champion of "Amateur Night" of the year 2001 at the Apollo Theater. In 2007, Kenichi became the grand champion of the dance contest at Showtime at the Apollo in 2006-2007 season after winning 7 times. Kenichi has performed one of his solo pieces, Robocop525, a fusion of Hip-Hop-related dance styles, mime, robot and illusion at the Hip-Hop Theater Festival. Robocop525 is a piece is about a day of a robot policeman.

MICHAEL JOHN GARCES is the Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles, California, a multi-ethnic, ensemble-based theater company that commissions and produces new plays of both original works and contemporary adaptations of classics, which combine the artistry of professionals and community collaborators. Some of his directing credits include new work by by Luis Alfaro, Brooke Berman, Teo Castellanos, Oscar Colón, Kia Corthron, Eisa Davis, José Cruz Gonzales, Jeffrey Hatcher, Eduardo Machado, Melanie Marnich, Dan O’Brien, Adam Rapp, Carmen Rivera, Luis Santeiro, Nilaja Sun, Caridad Svich, Cándido Tirado and Craig Wright. As a playwright, his pieces include Los Illegals, points of departure, and Acts of Mercy. Currently, he is a resident playwright at New Dramatists. Solo performance pieces include agua ardiente, running the red, t.r.u.s.t , and cocked. This season he will be directing the break/s by Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Actors Theater of Louisville Humana Festival and The Walker) and Someday by Julie Marie Myatt (Cornerstone).

PAUL S. FLORES is an HBO Def Poet, a Hip-Hop Theater performer, published author, Youth Speaks mentor and University of San Francisco Dept. of Performing Arts & Social Justice lecturer. A nationally distinguished writer and Spoken Word performer, Flores is the principal playwright of REPRESENTA! directed by Danny Hoch, Fear of a Brown Planet, and the author of the novel Along the Border Lies, which won a 2003 National PEN literary award. He has twice received the National Performance Network Creation Commission (2004, 2006), and was recently awarded an Investing in California Artists Grant by the Center for Cultural Innovation. Flores has performed at over 100 high schools and universities, and featured at The Hip-Hop Theater Festival: Bay Area, The Havana Hip-Hop Festival, America Libre Hip-Hop Mexico City, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Conference 2006 in San Antonio, TX, and Americans for the Arts Conference 2006 in Milwaukee, WI. For more info: myspace.com/paulfloresrepresenta

PSALMAYENE 24, a.k.a. Gregory Morrison, is an actor, playwright and singer/songwriter. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, he presently lives in the Washington, DC area where he is also the Master Teaching Artist and a commissioned writer with Arena Stage. Psalmayene started his professional performing career with the Hip-Hop dance company Subtle Motion, and as a principle dancer with the Kankouran West African Dance Company. His one man play, Free Jujube Brown!, is recognized as a seminal piece in Hip-Hop Theatre and will be published by TCG in the forthcoming Hip-Hop Theatre anthology Playz from the Boom-Box Galaxy. His other Hip-Hop Theatre credits include choreographing the ensemble play Rhyme Deferred, co-creating the ACT-CO produced The Hip-Hop Nightmares of Jujube Brown (Helen Hayes nomination) and conceiving and writing Undiscovered Genius of the Concrete Jungle. He is currently at work on a play commissioned by Imagination Stage. His “Folk-Hop” band, PS24, has delighted audiences at venues such as The Lincoln Theater, The Baltimore Museum of Art and New York City’s S.O.B.’s. Visit PS24 at www.myspace.com/ps24music.

RHA GODDESS’ work has been internationally featured in several compilations, anthologies, forums and festivals. Rha’s debut project, “Soulah Vibe”, received rave industry reviews from several influential publications .As Founder and CEO of Divine Dime Entertainment, Ltd., she was one of the first women in Hip-Hop to create, independently market and commercially distribute her own music world wide. Her activist work includes, Co-founding the Sista II Sista Freedom School for Young Women of Color, and being the former International Spokeswoman for the Universal Zulu Nation. Rha has also been featured keynote at the Women & Power Summit, The Bioneers Conference (San Rafael), Americans For The Arts, The Environmental Grantmakers Conference and The Green Festival among others. Rha’s current projects include being the Founder and Project Director of The Next Wave of Women & Power/”We Got Issues!” and working on a modern trilogy entitled, “Meditations With The Goddess.” “LOW” Part I of the Meditations Trilogy premiered for sold out audiences at the prestigious Humana Festival for New American Plays in 2006.

SETH ZVI ROSENFELD'S Hip-Hop related plays include: The Writing on the Wall which was first produced in 1986 at EST and details the life of a teenager who can only express himself through graffiti. Servy-n-Bernice 4ever, written in 1988, is about the relationship between a white stick up kid, Servy, and his long time upwardly mobile black girlfriend, Bernice. A Brother's Kiss (1989) is a one act play about a night in the life of a crackhead, Lex, and his Cop brother, Mick. The Flatted Fifth (1997), starred Danny Hoch and follows a multiracial group of artists to Israel where each attempts to reconcile their identity. La Familia, My Starship and PS:I'm glad you sent your hair are all tiny plays about a weed dealer who winds up in Iraq. Everythings Turning into Beautiful 2006 is about two lyricists making a run at love. Handball (2008) follows nine characters at a neighborhood handball court toward tragedy and will be produced next season at The New Group. Seth is currently adapting the movie Superfly for Broadway.

SUHEIR HAMMAD is a poet raised in Brooklyn, hailing from Palestine.

THE SUICIDE KINGS are a spoken word power house comprised of Geoff Trenchard, Jamie DeWolf, and Rupert Estanislao. Collectively, they are known for their explosive live performances combining gritty punk rock theatrics, a cappella hip-hop and vaudeville comedy into what the SF Chronicle has described as a “high octane mix of the profane and the profound.” The Kings also facilitate workshops and host slams for the inmates in San Quentin Penitentiary and create feature length performances with at risk youth. Their hard-hitting work has been featured on two seasons of Russell Simmon’s HBO Def Poetry Jam, UPN, 60 Minutes and radio stations from the Mid-West to the Phillipines. The Suicide Kings are widely renowned for their dedication to their craft and breath taking live shows that redefine spoken word, comedy and hip hop theater which prompted Stanford Radio to call them “the tattooed knuckles under the velvet glove of American poetry.”

T.TARA TURK attended Eugene Lang College and Sarah Lawrence College where she received the Lipkin Playwrighting Award. She was also a Van Lier Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop. She’s written two novels : "Things Fall Together," about a missing hip hop mogul. and “Boys, Girls, Headwraps and Haikus” about the 1990s NYC poetry scene. T.Tara is also the author of four screenplays as well as three short plays that are currently in the festival circuit. Her plays have appeared at New Federal Theater, Ensemble Studio Theater as well as the Actor’s Studio. She was in the Guy Hanks/Marvin Miller Screenwriting program as well as the Diversity Workshop at the Producer’s Guild. She is a regular blogger at www.bgirlstance.com.