Amy Melissa Reed is an artist and creator of Ma Series . www.amymelissareed
Lei (雷)
J. Andrea Porras /yAyA/
They| Ella| Sir
Based on Unceded Me-Wuk, Miwok, Maidu Nisenan and Patwin land also known as Sacramento, California (1990-present)
Founding member / MA Series Arts
J. Andrea Porras / yAyA is a Queer, Two -Spirit, Coahuiltecan descendant ~ ChicanIndia, madre, cultura cura curator/producer, intersectional artist/ practitioner; with over 25 years’ experience in performance, organizing, facilitation, grant making, grant reviewing, philanthropy, and mentoring. Porras began their performative journey as a roller skating waiter edutaining and serving up Tex -Mex campo to mesa cuisine at her familia’s restaurant Amezcua’s, located in their beloved home barrio and birth place of San Felipe, Del Rio Tejas. It was from there that they witnessed and began to really trust: We Got Us, when her parents y comunidad pulled together support for two other dance companeras y ella to accept their opportunity to travel hasta Hong Kong, China as young Americana dance art ambassadors. Once there, they had the honor to perform and exchange cultural dance experiences with multiple communities. From then on and now 4 decades later, they continue on their Charcoal Foot Travels as relative and guest upon Sacred Indigenous Lands through commissions, invitations, collaborations, research, both self and grant funded; site specific installations, ritual performance, teatro y flor y canto movimiento.
Porras earned their B.A. degree from California State University Sacramento, Theatre Dance and Cultural Anthropology Departments, where they specialized in Black, Indigenous, and Chicano Theatre. They focused on acting, improv movement, producing and video documenting. Porras dedicated their early years at CSUS recruiting hundreds of first-generation students from Sacramento high schools. They were recruited by the Education Opportunity Program as a student teacher / peer mentor in Ethnic Studies, Acting, Chicano Theatre, Cultural Anthropology and African- Caribbean Dance. Simultaneously, Porras spent years as an artist in resident at elementary and middle schools in Sacramento, funded by The Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. They studied, taught, performed and participated in Inter-Tribal ceremonies as an Afro- Caribbean, Danza Mexika traditional dancer predominantly connecting and building in Northern California across through the Southwest, and later in Cuba, Mexico, Africa and NY. They crossed over from teaching artist and community cultural producer to Arts administrator and philanthropy focus in joining the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. They served as the cities Arts Education coordinator and later Cofounded, Directed and Facilitated a Roots, Altars and Movement course at World Arts Space. The WAS project brought together 8 artists for 8 weeks 8 hours a day offering free and accessible Arte y Cultura. A community residency/ building relation with 100 emerging youth artists through an all immersive arts training safe space embedded in the community of Oak Park in the Summers of 2004 & 05.
Porras also served as a community development organizer, with Mutual Housing of California. In their 4-year term, they created civic leadership engagement and arts and cultural revival pop ups workshops in multiple incredibly diverse and intergenerational family subsidized housing communities they served in throughout the Sacramento region. Later came the call to action in serving as manager, community and art gallery curator at Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanacer. TANA is based in the rural community of Woodland CA. alongside Malaquias Montoya they managed and lead an amazing and talented mentee /student/ artist staff, they collectively recruited and grew new generations of political poster makers on the satellite location for the University of California at Davis Chicana/o Studies Department. Porras recently exited their 5-year role as Arts Grant Specialist for the California Arts Council, where they managed a portfolio totaling approximately $9 million in funding per year. Currently they stand for love, dignity and transformation as an agent for BIPOC communities as a member of the Caltrans Office of Race and Equity, Native American Liaison Branch Headquarters. They are a graduate of the 2004 NALAC Leadership Institute as well as an invited peer for the 2017 Advocacy Leader Institute, they are currently attending IAIA as a student in the Native American Art History certificate program and part of the 3rd year cohort at the Intercultural Leadership Institute . Porras, co-founded Movimiento Molcajete (1997) Contemporary Indigenous Teatro Co. & MA Series Arts (2018), They are proud mama of JAH’Sol Amaru Porras a creative powerhouse of his own.
Khimberly Marshall Sacramento, CA (MacBeth Project)
Khimberly Marshall (MacBeth Project) has 18 years combined experience in both Theater and Film production having written, directed and produced national commercials spots, short films and regional theater productions. She has won numerous awards for art and literature. Khimberly has also worked for major clients such as the California Music Theater, Sacramento Ballet, Sacramento Area Theater Alliance, Theater El Dorado Board, Celebration Arts Board, El Teatro Espejo, and the Creative Arts League of Sacramento. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Theater Management with a second Bachelor’s degree in Film from The Art Institute of California. Previously engaged at the Crocker Art Museum as an Art Corp Fellow, she was embedded in the Block by Block Initiative, creating social practice art in underrepresented communities. Khimberly finds her most rewarding work in providing support to people and organizations that foster community.
Currently, she is delving deeper into her own artistry as a sculptor, having shown her work as several galleries in Northern California, she hopes to one day find her art in the very museums that began her love for the arts. Oh and by the way…she is also a ninja!
Shanna Sordahl Brazil/Oakland, CA
Shanna Sordahl is a sound artist and composer based in Oakland, CA. Using amplified cello with analog and digital electronics and installation art as her primary mediums, Shanna’s work is a continual exploration of one’s relationship to both sound and physical spaces. She emphasizes timbral changes, the resonant body of objects, and the re-contextualization of sound through the use of unconventional playing techniques, feedback, and audience immersion. Shanna strives to create sonic and physical spaces that induce a focused state of awareness, where one is encouraged to reflect on or reconsider their relationship to sound, people, spaces, and ultimately, ideas.
Her current focuses include a fascination with blurring the lines between performance spaces and installation to emphasize the transformative potential of these events. Seeing intricate connections between the experience of music and day to day life, Shanna cannot separate music from its social implications and lived realities. She views sound immersion and performance as methods for processing and re-contextualizing past experiences while simultaneously imagining and creating new possibilities for the future.
Drucella Anne Miranda Woodland, CA
drucella anne miranda is a daughter, sister, decolonizing feminist,
artist, caretaker, and fur mama. she likes to collect, seek, hoard, and
find random objects to make things out of, hence leaving her with a
cluster of stuff that she creates and transforms into art. may you find
some piece/peace of whatever it is you may seek in my creations.
she was born in the borderlands of Texas and has been a long time resident of the Central Valley. an alumna from the University of California Davis, she has a bachelors in Women and Gender Studies as well as American Studies. as a student she worked as a community activist with youth to foster consciousness through critical dialogue and the arts. she continues her artivism and healing through vulnerability through both the visual arts and her words.
Andrea Williams Troy, NY 2018-2021
Sound artist, Andrea Williams, utilizes site-specific elements and perceptual cues to reveal the unseen connections between people and their environment. For over ten years, she has been creating compassionate spaces for restoration, creativity, and healing through various modalities including soundscapes, soundwalks, SleepWalks (soundwalks in people’s dreams), and yoga based on concepts of acoustic ecology and deep listening. Her compositions make use of field recordings, instruments, computer technologies and the sound of the performance space itself. She has exhibited her work and performed both solo and with various musicians and artists at galleries and alternative spaces internationally, such as the Whitney Museum, Eyebeam, Roulette, The National Gallery of Denmark (SMK), Children’s Creativity Museum, NPR, and the Mamori sound artist residency in the Amazon rainforest. She creates soundscapes and video art for dance companies that has included: Hope Mohr Dance at Stanford University, Alyce Finwall Dance Theater at the Joyce Theater in NYC, and through receiving a New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) grant for SleepWalks: The Body of Dreams, with Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company at the Chapel + Cultural Center in Troy, NY and at Kaatsbaan International Dance Center in Tivoli, NY. She is a board member of Ma Series Arts, a certified restorative yoga teacher, a sound healing practitioner, and she has studied our connection to waterways via soundwalks with Pauline Oliveros at RPI, obtaining her Ph.D. in Electronic Arts in 2018.
Biggi Vinkeloe Oakland, CA /Sweden
Biggi Vinkeloe is one of few women musicians of her generation that has been influential in jazz and improvisational music. She has an enormous musical range and has initiated a great number of genre-bending projects and focuses on bridging traditional and folk music from India and Europe, sacred music and jazz, field recordings and electronic with acoustic music, compositions and improvisations. Music is the most wonderful and magic universal language not limited by any border.
http://www.openhorizonrecords.com/
gabby fluke-mogul is a violinist, composer, & educator living in Oakland, California.
They exist within the threads of free improvisation, the jazz continuum, noise, & new music.
Their playing has been described as embodied, visceral, & virtuosic.
gabby is humbled to have collaborated with Kyle Bruckmann, Nava Dunkelman, Wendy Eisenberg, Fred Frith, Jordan Glenn, Jacob Felix Heule, Lisa Mezzacappa, Kanoko Nishi-Smith, Pauline Oliveros, Danishta Rivero, & Tom Weeks, among many other musicians, poets, dancers, & visual artists.
Tarisse Iriarte-Medina San Juan, PR/Brooklyn
Tarisse Iriarte Medina is an independent curator, and
consultant working in New York City and Puerto Rico
She is simply referred to as “Tee” in her beloved
Brooklyn Community. In 2017 Tee co-founded Curated Concepts LLC, a New York based Arts Consulting Firm that provides an array of services from Art Sales, curatorial & project management to full exhibition production. She is a proud arts activist and Afro Boricua working diligently on the liberation of Puerto Rico and Brooklyn by collaborating directly with arts activist on the island and in NY. Tee curates exhibits that contextualize the intersections of cultural arts, social justice and revolution. Her show Healing Drum of the Sun was a solo exhibition with multimedia artist Patrick Dougher, discusses the resilience of the Sacred Black body.
What you have been doing and your plans for the Ma series [Arts] are important, and necessary, not only for culture, or for us as women artists (though these are important), but for everyone’s communities urban and rural, and for life itself which is dependent on these creative energies .
Susan Alcorn – Pedal Steel Guitarist, Musician, Composer
MA Series Arts.org 