SPEAKERS DESCRIPTIONS

ARTBURSTS ARTISTS
Lyn Starr
Lyn Starr is a young, multi-talented performing artist from Pittsburgh, PA. Lyn’s greatest passion is writing and producing Hip Hop music, releasing 5 original mixtapes (3 solo and 2 collaborative), as well as 1 solo EP.
He is an artist with 1Hood Media.
 
Gunner Jules Krogman
Gunner Jules Krogman is a Sicangu Lakota singer, songwriter, and producer who grew up with his family on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. He says that the music scene was almost nonexistent and there wasn't a path to follow as an artist. Gunner picked up music production in high school and started singing and rapping over his own beats and eventually began spending most of his free time writing songs and making music.
Tom Hubbard
Tom Hubbard, is an artist and reluctant activist working on design, fine art and public art projects. Regardless of the medium or project, Hubbard’s approach is rooted in his design training and the belief that the best solution often comes from the problem.
 
Michael Sakamoto
Michael Sakamoto is a performance, media, and photo artist, a leading butoh dance theater artist, whose work has been presented in 14 countries. Michael is also a publishing scholar, university professor, and longtime arts manager, whose hybrid career is dedicated to nurturing cultural dialogue and sustainability through a broad palette of artistic, intellectual, and social methodologies.
 
 
Ana Mendez
Ana Mendez is a Cuban-American performance artist and dancer working in Miami, Florida.
ART TALK ARTISTS
Blak Rap M.A.D.U.S.A
Blak Rap M.A.D.U.S.A. (Making A Difference Using Skills & Activism) emerges from humble streets, painting a vivid picture of her culture and her vision for social justice and spiritual freedom. Poet, activist, historian, international Hip-Hop Artivist, she uses Hip-Hop music as a vessel to channel her powerful anthems for political movements for Equity and Human Rights.
 
Lois Weaver
Lois Weaver is an artist, activist and teaches part time at Queen Mary University of London. She has been a writer, director and performer with Peggy Shaw and Split Britches since 1980. Her experiments in performance as a means of public engagement include Long Tables, Porch Sittings, Care Cafes and her facilitating persona, Tammy WhyNot. Lois is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow for 2016-2018.
 
Jamie J Brunson
Jamie J. Brunson is Executive Director of First Person Arts, a Philadelphia not-for-profit that transforms true personal stories into performances for the stage, page, online and on-air. We do this because true stories resonate with an undeniable authentic humanity - one that encourages empathy, creates affinity, inspires resilience and builds stronger communities. Ms. Brunson is also producer, co-writer and host of Commonspace, a radio hour and podcast in collaboration with NPR-Affiliate, WHYY. She is a memoirist, storyteller, poet and playwright.
 
Mauricio Salgado and Arielle Julia Brown
Remember2019 description: Remember2019 is an effort to make space for the congregation of the Black communities and Black cultural workers of Phillips County, AR. Our work is to support and facilitate local practices of self-determination, memory, and reflection, that are directly related to the mass lynching of 1919, the lasting effects of racial terror, and the current and future health of these communities.

Arielle Julia Brown's bio: Arielle Julia Brown is a creative producer, social practice artist and facilitator. Arielle is a co-creative producer on Remember2019.

Mauricio Tafur Salgado's bio: Mauricio Tafur Salgado is a divinely tormented +first gen born to proudly subversive Colombians with graduate degrees + brown skinned + aspiring bio-regionalist + cis-hetero + married + artist pursuing justice and healing through a decolonial framework. He come from the everglades watershed, his antepasados and a solid plate of his grandma’s arepas and buñuelos.
 
Vanessa German
Vanessa German is a visual and performance artist based in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood. As a citizen artist, German explores the power of art and love as a transformative force in the dynamic cultural ecosystem of communities and neighborhoods.