Redefining Democracy in America: Episodes in Black and White, Part 1

Jacki Apple is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, writer, and audio composer/producer who has received international recognition for her pioneering audio and radio productions that have been broadcast worldwide, commissioned by New American Radio (http://www.somewhere.org) and featured in festivals and on anthology CDs and solo albums. https://www.jackiapple.com/sound/radio.html. Her full-length work Voices in the Dark was featured in “Listening to the Universe,” Datscha Radio Festival, Berlin, August 2020.

Keith Antar Mason is artistic director of The Hittite Empire Performance Art Collective, an all Black Intergenerational Men's Cultural Elite. He is the author of For Black Boys Who Have Considered Homicide When the Streets Were Too Much (1986), From Hip-Hop to Hittite and Other Poetic Healing Rituals for Young Black Men: A Retrospective (2005), and New Wine & Black Men's Feet (2009). His new choreopoem, In The House of a Young Pharaoh, is being developed for Medium Production in Los Angeles in 2021.

Linda Albertano is a neo-feminist Los Angeles performance artist, poet, and musician with a satiric political bent whose work has been performed at numerous venues nationally and internationally over four decades. Her full-length projects for radio, CD, and live performance include Spanish Is the Loving Tongue (KCRW), Goldminers (KPFK), Joan of Compton, Joan of Arcadia, and Skin (New Alliance Records). She founded the Nearly Fatal Women performance group with poets Suzanna Lummis and Laurel Ann Bogen.

Akilah Nayo Oliver (1961–2011) was a poet/performance artist who brought a powerful feminist and spiritual perspective to the African- American experience. In the 1990s she founded and performed with the feminist performance collective Sacred Naked Nature Girls. Oliver's books include A Toast In The House of Friends (2009) and A Collection of Objects (2010). She taught poetry and writing at Eugene Lang College/The New School for Liberal Arts, Pratt Institute, and The Poetry Project in New York City.