Vuyo Sotashe (Performer) is a New York based vocalist, composer, and performer originally from South Africa. Since moving to the United states as a Fulbright Scholar, he has performed with celebrated jazz legends including Dee Dee Bridgewater, Jimmy Heath, George Benson, Al Jarreau, Barry Harris, and Winard Harper, to name a few. Recently, Vuyo appeared with multi Grammy Award winner and Pulitzer Prize winner Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra as a featured artist on their 2018 Winter Tour across the United States. Sotashe has also appeared as a leader and sideman at the internationally acclaimed Montreux Jazz Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, Cape Town International Jazz Festival, Newport Jazz Fest, and Joy of Jazz, and Arcevia Jazz Festival. Sotashe is the recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship for Music at Joe's Pub/Public Theater for 2018-2019. He collaborated and performed in Somi Kakoma's debut theater work "Dreaming Zenzile", which was premiered at Joe's Pub, as well as the Apollo, and made his commercial-off-broadway debut as part of the cast in "Black Light", created by performance artist Daniel Alexander Jones in February and October of 2018. Sotashe has gone on to premier a new play, "Cartography" by Kaneza Schaal & Christopher Myres at the Kennedy Center in January of 2019, which will be at the New Victory Theater in January of 2020. Currently he performs as one of the fronting vocalists in the internationally touring, multi-disciplinary band collective Mwenso and the Shakes, while leading his own ensemble appearing on stages across the United States, and around the world. Sotashe continues to create, collaborate, record, and perform as an indelible creative voice both in his home country, New York City, as well as the international scene.

Kineta Kunutu (Performer) is a New York-based actor originally from Johannesburg, South Africa. Favorite theater credits include: Malvolio (Classical Theatre of Harlem), But I Cd Only Whisper (The Flea) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival); TV credits include Citidal, The Blacklist and The Good Fight. Kineta is an alumna of the Yale School of Drama—where her credits include Romeo & Juliet, Trojan Women, If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka, Mies Julie, and In the Red and Brown Water. In addition to her screen and stage work, Kineta is also a voice actor, yoga and kettlebell instructor and teaching artist.

Shariffa Ali (Co-Creator + Director) is a creative leader, navigating the realms of theatre, film, VR, and academia. She is dedicated to advancing radical change through the transformative power of art and activism.  Residing in New York since 2013, Shariffa has distinguished herself as a director and community-engaged arts practitioner.  Her directorial endeavors encompass a diverse portfolio, featuring films & VR experiences like "Atomu" and "You Go Girl!"—both selections at Sundance Festival in — and Off-Broadway and Regional theatre productions such “The Winters Tale”, "Mies Julie" and "School Girls; or The African Mean Girls Play."  Shariffa's achievements are underscored by a series of accolades, including the Sundance New Frontier Fellowship and the Royal National Theater R&D Fellowship in the UK.  Noteworthy recognitions also include the POV/PBS Spark Grant, the Hermitage Major Theatre Award, and the Digital Lab Africa Award.  Shariffa has served as the Patrick M. Swayzee Artist in Residence at Miami University and an Artist in Residence at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  At Brown she is the Guest Director-In-Residence in the Department of Africana Studies / Rites and reason Theatre and is a faculty member at Princeton University.  Shariffa is a proud alumni of the Theatre and Performance studies program at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Joanna Ruth Evans (Co-Creator + Dramaturg) is a theater artist and performance scholar from Cape Town, South Africa. They are a PhD candidate in performance studies at New York University and a critical studies fellow in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program (ISP). They research improvisational performance practices and environmentalism in Southern Africa and the Southern United States. Joanna's creative practice is organized around collaboration and open-ended inquiry, and their plays have toured throughout South Africa, as well as to international festivals in Italy, Germany, Iran, Hungary, Réunion, and the United States. Their scholarship has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, Women&Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Performance Research, and Ecumencia. Joanna holds a BA in Theater and Performance from the University of Cape Town, and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. 

Oluwasiji (Siji) Soetan‘25 (Assistant Choreographer) is a senior at Brown concentrating in Economics and Performance Studies. He has previously worked with the Rites and Reason Theatre, playing Kwaku in Afrofantasia: The Journey of Iyanu, as a crew member for The Providence Garden Blues, and reading stage directions for the show Sweet Chariot.  Additionally, he played the role of Kole in the Disney Animated Series Iwájú. Siji is also the co-captain of OJA! Modern African Dance, and a member of Mezcla Latin Dance Troupe. 

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson (Visual / Sound Designer) is a visual artist, scholar, composer, and curator. Her practice centers on the interplay of animation, printmaking, music, and dance, informed by a yearning to understand how our current circumstance is tethered to the trauma of the past. Through her visual, sonic, and movement investigations across time and technology she disrupts and asserts ideas of history, body, liberation, and otherness. Above all, she is interested in redistributing the privileges that allow her to maintain her creative and scholarly practice.

She received her BFA in Film, Animation, and Video at RISD, her MA in Public Humanities at Brown University, and a heavy dose of education working with youth in Baltimore, South Africa, India, New York City and Providence. She has curated exhibitions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Artist Proof Studio and the ABSA Art Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa; RISD Museum; and Brown University Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, where she was also a Public History of Slavery Fellow. 

As the 2019 inaugural Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Department of Health she utilized the arts to confront health disparities. She was the 2020 Artist Fellow at the RISD Museum making work in response to the collection. As a 2022 Fitt Artist-in-Residence at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, she created Not Never More a visual remix of the historic wallpaper Les Vues D’amérique Du Nord. At the 150th Anniversary of the Colfax Massacre she designed the Colfax Massacre Memorial—etched in granite, it honors and centers the stories of the Black victims of the tragedy. She is the illustrator of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, adapted for young readers by Ibram X Kendi.

Jazzmen is currently working on a series called Contraband, which focuses on how the industry of slavery laid the blueprint for drug crimes, illicit economies, substance use disorder, and mass incarceration in Black communities in Baltimore, based on her research as artist fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. 

You can find her work in public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, RISD Museum, Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College, Mt Holyoke College Art Museum, the Joshua Hempsted House Museum and many others.