Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, “Someone’s Dead Already” was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His forthcoming book “Blood On The Fog” is being released this fall in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” James Baldwin
Gilda Sheppard is currently a member of the faculty in Sociology, Cultural and Media Studies at Evergreen State College in Tacoma, Washington. From 1995-96 Sheppard was a visiting lecturer at University of Cape Coast in the Sociology, Anthropology and Demography Department, and in 2018 she was a visiting lecturer at Ashesi University in Ghana, West Africa.
Sheppard is an award-winning filmmaker who has screened her documentaries throughout the United States, and internationally in Ghana, West Africa, at the Festival Afrique 360 in Cannes, France, and in Berlin Germany at the International Black Film Festival. Sheppard is a 2017 Hedgebrook Fellow for documentary film and a 2019 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship.
Her documentaries include stories of resilience of Liberian women and children refugees in Ghana; three generations of Black families in an urban neighborhood in Buffalo, New York; and a film ethnography of stories from folklore started by Zora Neale Hurston in Alabama’s AfricaTown.
She currently completed her documentary Since I Been Down on education, organizing and healing developed and led by incarcerated women and men in Washington State’s prisons. Since I Been Down has been accepted at over10 film festivals in USA and Canada and won the Gold Prize at the Social Justice Film Festival and recognized among “Best of the Fest” at DOC NYC the largest documentary film festival in USA. Since I Been Down has been praised by Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of CA, Santa Cruz Angela Davis, at a DOCNYC 2020 Facebook Live Event with Director Gilda Sheppard, King County (WA) Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, and Executive Director of Abolitionist Law Center Robert Saleem Holbrook. Seattle Met named Since I Been Down as “What to Watch” in 2020.
For over a decade Sheppard has taught sociology classes in Washington State prisons, Sheppard is a sponsor for the Black Prisoner’s Caucus in Washington State, and is a co-founder and faculty for FEPPS- Freedom Education for Puget Sound an organization offering college credited courses at Washington Correctional Center for Women.
Sheppard is the author of several publications including Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice: A Way Out of No Way (2013)
SINCE I BEEN DOWN streaming 2/5-2/10
You are invited one and all to a rare opportunity to watch our Evergreen-Tacoma colleague Dr. Gilda Sheppard’s long-awaited new documentary film SINCE I BEEN DOWN
This timely work of art has been accumulating an avalanche of accolades: DOCNYC 2020 Audience Favorite. Winner of the 2020 Social Justice Film Feature Documentary Gold Prize. One of Seattle Met’s top movies not to miss. Seattle Times feature by Evergreen alumn Naomi Ishisaka. Please see below for a poster with a lovely quote from Gilda.
Starting this Friday 2/5 at noon and ending Wednesday 2/10 at 5pm, the film will be exclusively available to the Evergreen community for asynchronous streaming in the “virtual screening room” that we have created for “Reimagining Community Safety.” (Please note: no recording of any type will be allowed.)
Born in Topeka, Kansas in a military family, Carol Rashawnna Williams is the only child of Bessie Williams & Willie C. Williams. Soon after birth Carol and her family moved to Frankfurt Germany where she grew up on a military base and went to German schools until she was 11 ½. At which time she and her mother settled in Tacoma, WA. Carol graduated from Mount Tahoma High School, went to the Evergreen State College, was an Upward Bound student of 4 years.
Carol’s mother was a certified missionary and gave her life to community service for over 25 years, feeding and sheltering those who were homeless. or re-entering society from prison. Carol’s father was a patriot and believed in American Democracy. He gave 28 years of his life to his country through military service.
After graduating from college Carol was accepted as a Vista-Americorps for 1 year in Seattle’s White Center neighborhood working with young single mothers of Head Start students get jobs and get into school. Carol had her first group exhibit at the Seattle Central Community College Gallery in 1990 when she attended Seattle Central College, it was a community college. Her second group exhibit was in 1996 at the Evergreen State College at which time her work was acquired and catalogued into The Evergreen State College’s (TESC) video art library and showcased into the TESC student anthology book.
Carol is a mother to 2 children. She currently resides in Seattle, WA and works to mentor emerging artists from various backgrounds. Carol is a musician of 21 years who plays the violin and the viola. Carol enjoys hiking in the Pacific Northwest’s numerous old growth forests. Carol was certified thru the City of Seattle Parks & Recreation Urban Forest Educator Program and loves to teach about conifers, indigenous and invasive species. You can find her walking all over Seattle.
Carol deeply believes in the power of art to build community, bridge community relationships and create authentic space for healing.
Lauren Levin is a poet, mixed-genre writer and art writer, author of The Braid (Krupskaya, 2016) and Justice Piece // Transmission (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018). With Emji Spero, they were developmental editor for We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, edited by Ellis Martin and Zachary Ozma (Nightboat, 2019), and with Eric Sneathen, they are editing Camille Roy’s selected prose. Their gender identity is some mix of belated queer, Jewish great-aunt, and aspirational Frank O’Hara. They are still figuring it out. They live in Richmond, CA, are from New Orleans, LA, and are committed to queer art, intersectional feminism, being a parent, and anxiety.
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist, & the author of Agon, a forthcoming chapbook from EconoTextualObjects; The Easy Body, a love letter from hell that was published in 2017 by Timeless, Infinite Light; and PDF, a chapbook published by Solar Luxuriance in 2014. Their work, cutting across various materials and disciplines, has been shown & performed in the Los Angeles River, galleries, punk houses, plazas, and microcinemas across the U.S. They are currently working on a project interviewing activist Latinx youth in emergent Latinx communities across the United States; and an experimental documentary on the geography of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona in collaboration with their mother Vanessa Acosta. Born somewhere between here and Diriamba, Nicaragua, they were raised in the Huntington Park and Highland Park neighborhoods of Los Angeles and across the West Coast and Mexico; they’ve called California home for a significant part of their life. Tatiana now lives in a rent controlled apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Rosa Clemente is an Afro-Puerto Rican journalist and scholar-activist researching national liberation struggles inside the United States, Afro-Latinx identity+politics, sexism within Hip-Hop culture, media justice, Hip-Hop activism, and African American and Latinx unity. More information about her can be found here: http://rosaclemente.net/biography-of-rosa-clemente/
Rosa’s schedule while she is on campus:
Wednesday, 2/27, 11:30-1pm Lecture Hall 1
Thursday, 2/28, 3-5pm Longhouse
Many thanks to the sponsors and programs contributing to Rosa’s days with us!
Sponsors include: Media Island International, the Women of Color in Leadership Movement, the Willi Unsoeld Seminar Series, the CCBLA, the Art Lecture Series, and the the Dean’s Match.
Programs include: “Who Gets What?: Political Economy of Income, Wealth, and Economic Justice,” – “Political Economy and Environmental and Social Movements: Race, Class, and Gender,” – “Mediaworks,” – “The Spanish-Speaking World,” – “Teaching ELLs: Culture, Theory, and Methods,” and “Unruly Bodies: Health, Media, Biology, and Power.”
Vivian Hua (華婷婷) is a writer, filmmaker, and organizer who regularly traverses up and down the west coast. As the Executive Director at Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, a Co-Founder of the civil rights film series, The Seventh Art Stand, and the Editor-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary arts publication, REDEFINE, much of her work unifies her interest in the metaphysical with her belief that art can positively transform the self and society.
Her narrative short film, Searching Skies–which touches on the controversial topic of Syrian refugee resettlement in the United States–was released in 2017, after making festival rounds. She is currently writing her next film projects, as well as researching national efforts to preserve cultural space.
Sand works across genres and media, dislodging poetry from the book into more unconventional contexts. From 2013-2015, she served with Garrick Imatani as artists-in-residence at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center, responding to historical surveillance files on local political activists; and then she created textile art with street vendor Marcia Rodrigues Braga during her Despina International Artist Residency in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. Much of her work has focused on economic injustice and homelessness, from a magic show she created about the financial collapse to the Right 2 Survive Ambassador Program she co-founded for housed people to learn from people experiencing homelessness.
She is the executive director of Street Roots, a weekly newspaper sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and poverty as means of earning an income.
I am an artist-researcher, educator, poet, and activist. I’m an immigrant from Taiwan—a contested spit of land with a long history of colonization. As the mother of two beautiful human beings, I struggle to pass on ancestral knowledge that I hang onto, by a very thin thread, worn thin by the mandate to assimilate. I’m learning to listen for the thread that resists the loud clamoring of a fossil-fuel dependent culture of capitalism, globalization, and neo-liberalism. Our world has been fractured and broken; I believe the stories of our ancestors, stories of young and old, from the wildly diverse corners of the world, need to be gathered together to restore cultures of care and love. I do the work of listening to and gathering stories in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, where I am the Program Director, and at the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living in Rhode Island. Though I currently live in Rhode Island, my soul migrates from shore to shore at regular intervals, touching down in rural Vermont, suburban Chicago, and coastal Port Townsend.
Ju-Pong Lin collects stories from her neighbors, makes art on her couch, in galleries and in theaters. Laundry, bread, and everyday stories are the seedlings for Ju-Pong’s interdisciplinary, socially engaged videos, participatory installations and performances. She received her MFA in Intermedia from The University of Iowa, and has shown her work nationally (Women in the Director’s Chair, Walker Museum of Art, and New York’s Mix festival.) She has taught media arts on the faculty of The Evergreen State College, and is currently the Program Director of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Ju-Pong lives in Rhode Island and parents two children, who school her in the practice of love and compassion every day.
As an artist, Ju-Pong fuses story circle, video, needlecraft, and community organizing to advocate for grassroots sustainability education and climate justice, in solidarity with indigenous movements to reclaim space.
