Vatic Astahili Tayari Kuumba [V.A.T.K] (he/him) is an artist, writer, popular educator, and father of three children. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Vatic aligns his artistic practice and facilitation skills to catalyze movement building for racial and climate justice. Currently, Vatic is an Artist-in-Residence with One Nation One Future’s Arts for Everybody Initiative, where he is embedded in Providence’s Chad Brown Public Housing Complex and is the Lead Artist for the site-specific multimedia project, Casa Futura. He is also an Arts Facilitator with One Square World, a racial and climate justice organization, where he applies creativity as an essential tool for policy design, civic engagement, and popular education.  A formative member of Providence’s Racial Equity and Environmental Justice Committee, Vatic collaborated on the creation of the City of Providence’s Climate Justice Plan and the Environmental Racism Resolution passed by Providence City Council in 2020.  In 2021, Vatic was Co-Director and Lead Writer MoralDocs, an abolitionist transmedia project and virtual reality film. Previous Arts Residencies include the State Association of Arts Agencies (2019) and the AS220 Live Arts Residency (2017), which culminated in the premiere of his first theatrical production, A Furtive Movement (2017). Vatic is also the recipient of the RI State Council for the Arts (RISCA) 2018 Fellowship for Theater and 2017 Playwright Merit Fellowship.

Rodney Witherspoon II, B/T MFA‘22 is an actor, writer, director, and educator. His play Tidwell, or the Plantation Play is published by Samuel French, Inc. As a performer and director, he has worked with various companies across the country, including Trinity Repertory Company, Antigravity Performance Project, Huntington Theatre Company, Front Porch Arts Collective, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Gamm Theatre, Mixed Magic Theatre, Wilbury Theatre Group, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, and Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, he is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and Actors’ Equity Association.

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson'15 MA Public Humanities, 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. 

Navaiya Williams‘25, is a graduating senior concentrating in Computer Science and Theater Arts and Performance Studies. She's been involved in over a dozen productions at Brown in many capacities: from stage managing TAPS Fall Dance Show 2024 and performing in Sock & Buskin's (S&B) seven methods of killing kylie jenner to directing Production Workshop’s (PW) Fairview, props designing Rites and Reason's Afrofantasia, and being a production assistant for Urban Bush Women's SCAT!..A musical biomythography at The Lindemann. This past year, she was co-technical director of Ensemble’s Pirates of Penzance, props designer and executive producer of S&B’s Sailboat Lullaby, and executive producer of PW’s The Fog. She also performed in Rites and Reason’s Sweet Chariot and WHAT!! EVER!! MAJOR!! LOSER!! and Then Act Like It in Writing is Live. She sits on two theater producing boards, Sock & Buskin and Production Workshop, and works as a teaching assistant for Brown’s only props class. She has also somehow found the time to teach young Black girls how to code. She believes in the transformative power of the performing arts.

Phoenyx Williams, is an extraterrestrial performing artist based in Providence, RI. He began performing as an MC in the hip hop group Dead Poetz before launching out on his own and collaborating with Erminio Pinique and Big Nazo where he works as a performer and creature fabricator. He found his home on stage at the Wilbury Theater where he served as a teaching Resident Artist. His performances include the rock musical Passing Strange, the end of the world drama Mr. Burns, Young Jean Lee’s Church, and original works Ui by Josh Short and New and Dangerous Ideas.  He has written and directed his hip hopera, The Invasion of Vox Populi, made his film debut in Transformer Man, and was honored as Best Supporting Actor by Motif Magazine for his role as Emcee and Actor in Ui. He made his film debut as a the troubled magazine editor in Nathan Suher’s, Assassination of Western Civilization, can also be seen in the historical drama Fighting for Freedom Lewis Hayden and the Underground Railroad and in the social justice film, Moral Docs, produced by Vatic Kuumba.  Mr. Williams' most recent role was in the Barker Playhouse's Wickham's Christmas at Pemberley directed by Vince Petronio.