Collaborative Artists
Meet the Artists
Our artists represent new and unique voices within the artistic community. They bring a diverse set of perspectives and approaches.
Jenna Anast, 2022 – Photo By: Courtney Morrison.
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Cat Mahari with Rae Chardonnay, Amir George, and Daniel Haywood
In-SessionCat Mahari creates work with personal and collective transformational possibilities. She is a free style hip hop and house dancer, with ongoing training in multiple modern techniques, ballet, Krump, Traditional West African, Cuban Salsa, and Chen taiji. In addition to movement performance, she is also composes music and designs the video projections for a significant portion of her projects. Her practice-‐as-‐research interdisciplinary solo mixtape series Violent/Break: Vol I, that questions delineations of violence, premiered in London at the Brink Festival (2011), and has since been shown in Carei, Romania and Toronto, CA. Her residency at Charlotte St. Foundation resulted in the multi-‐media interdisciplinary work Expectation of Violence/Rites due Spring: B-‐ BAM!, that articulates systemic and specific events of Blackness and America in Kansas City, which premiered at La Esquina Gallery. B-‐BAM! birthed the dynamic performance approach to dismantling anti-‐Blackness BAM! the Workshop.
Rae Chardonnay Taylor is a DJ, Arts Administrator and events producer based in Chicago dedicated to encouraging a life of open-minded learning and expression. She began DJing in 2010 and has since held residencies at prominent venues in Chicago including the late Double Door, The Promontory and Soho House. She has circulated many private and public events to share her musical styling techniques opening for acts such as Janelle Monae, Jamila Woods, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Madison McFerrin, Megan Thee Stallion, OSHUN, Tiffany Gouche, CeCe Peniston, J Rocc, Just Blaze, Little Dragon, Big Freedia and many others.
Amir George is a filmmaker and curator. Born and bred in Chicago. Amir creates work for the cinema, installation, and live performance. Amir’s motion picture work has been screened at film festivals including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, Afrikana Film Festival, and Chicago Underground Film Festival as well as cultural institutions, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Anthology Film Archives, Glasgow School of Art, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles, and Museum of Contemporary Arts Detroit. Amir has organized cinematic themed symposiums at Cooper Union, and Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh. Amir has curated exhibitions at Transmission Gallery Scotland, and Silent Funny Chicago. In addition to founding The Cinema Culture, a grassroots film programming organization, Amir is the co-‐founder of Black Radical Imagination a touring experimental short film series with Erin Christovale.
Daniel Haywood is a 2017 Chicago Dance Maker Lab artist, and an internationally respected dancer and educator of House and Hip Hop culture. He has been commissioned to speak, judge, host, dance and teach at many cultural events. He has worked closely with the University of Hip-‐Hop, Temple of Hip-‐Hop, and Urban Arts in Action Movement, Hip-‐Hop Congress, the Universal Zulu Nation and the U.S.A. States Department. Daniel has dedicated his energy towards understanding the origins, developing concepts and mastering the foundations of Hip-‐Hop’s cultural dance form known as B-‐Boying/Breakin, while also focusing on Freestyle, House, choreography, music, and health. He is a member of internationally recognized breaking crew, Phaze II– Crosstown Crew, as well as a founding leader of Awesome Style Konnection (A.S.K.), a Chicago-‐based all-‐elements crew, and F.E.W. Collective which joined artist activists from across the City to create social change through the arts in Chicago and overseas.
Chandra Christmas-Rouse
Outside the WallsRad LabBased in Bronzeville, Chandra Christmas-Rouse is an urban planner and data artist. Her creative practice focuses on building spatial imaginaries and interventions as a way to inform dialogue and development in cities and to engage the socio-political realities of disinvestment. Her most recent works were about Black women’s spatial sensibility and the city, broaching interferences among spatial production theory and black feminist theories as a means to transform urban redevelopment in Chicago.
Chineze Mogbo
Outside the WallsRad LabBased in Bronzeville, Chandra Christmas-Rouse is an urban planner and data artist. Her creative practice focuses on building spatial imaginaries and interventions as a way to inform dialogue and development in cities and to engage the socio-political realities of disinvestment. Her most recent works were about Black women’s spatial sensibility and the city, broaching interferences among spatial production theory and black feminist theories as a means to transform urban redevelopment in Chicago.
El Cardenal De Aztlán
In-SessionPerformance artist, photographer, Sports journalist, radio host of SCREAMS OF COMBAT. 2010 Propeller Fund Grant Awardee (Andy Warhol Foundation, Threewalls, Gallery 400 UIC). Founder of TSC Collective (@TSCCo) and Tamale Spaceship, a food truck and “long-term performance art project addressing the interaction among body, food, machines, wireless poetry and the city”. Selected by Threewalls to present Aztlan Goal Line as part of the first In-Session program, performance art series addressing migration.
Erma Ishara Standley
In-SessionErma Ishara (they/he) is a transmasc artist and community organizer. Their work uplifts building spaces for gender-expansive transformation through education, community care and media. As a published poet, writer, and creator of The FemmeBoi, they are committed to promoting and creating content centering the experiences of queer BIPOC communities..
Felicia Holman
Outside the WallsRad LabFelicia Holman is a cisgender Black woman, lifelong Chicagoan and interdisciplinary artist. An independent cultural producer/programmer and co-founder of Chicago-based Afrodiasporic feminist creative collective, Honey Pot Performance, Felicia’s creative/ professional and social practices are firmly grounded in critical thought, intersectionality, community building & embodied storytelling.
Imani Elizabeth Jackson & Collaborator Jo Stewart
In-SessionJo Stewart is a movement-theater artist and poet. She uses a combination of gesture, verse, and improvisational scores to make work that meets notions of blackness with queered mythologies. She has previously been an artist in residence at the Anderson Center at Tower View (2018), Atlantic Center for the Arts (2018), MAAS (2017), and Arts Letters and Numbers (2016). She is currently an artist in residence at The Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn, NY. She is the newest member of Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, currently touring Cellular Songs. Stewart graduated from Reed College with a BA in English literature (2014) and continues to study poetry under the guidance of experimental poet Tracie Morris. She teaches dance-theater at Pierrepont School in Westport, CT.
Imani Elizabeth Jackson is a poet with extradisciplinary leanings. Some of her writing can be found in or is forthcoming from Gramma Press Weekly, Flag + Void, Commune, Apogee, and HOLD. She is from Chicago.
Ireashia Bennett
Outside the WallsRad LabIreashia M. Bennett is a Black queer new media artist who communicates complex social issues into accessible formats through media and storytelling. They have produced multimedia essays, short documentaries, and experimental films that center and prioritize Black queer disabled perspectives and realities. With the Chosen Fam Dinner Project in Washington Park, they aim to explore food apartheid and create spaces where neighbors can collectively redefine and reimagine health. They will center the Black, chronically ill, and disabled experience in the shaping of new visions of what health and wellbeing can look like outside of able-bodied, White-centered notions of “health.”
