Performers
Each year the NIIC MainStage has featured performances by local, community-based and internationally known, awarded artists alike, including several Grammy Award-winning and nominated artists. Curated by the NIIC Partners, these performances uplift diverse artists and the diversity of our immigrant and refugee communities and the host region for each year’s conference. We are proud to announce the artists joining us for NIIC 2020 (list in formation; stay tuned for updates!):
Meklit Hadero is an Ethio-American vocalist, songwriter, composer and cultural activist, known for her electric stage presence and innovative take on Ethio-Jazz. Meklit has rocked stages from Addis Ababa (where she is a household name) to San Francisco (her beloved home-base), NYC, London, Montreal, Nairobi, Rome, Zurich, Helsinki, Rio, Cairo, and more. Meklit is Chief of Program at YBCA, as well as a National Geographic Explorer, a TED Senior Fellow and a former Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University. She is co-founder of the Nile Project, and a featured singer in the UN Women theme song. Her TED Talk has been watched by more than 1.2 million people, and her music videos air daily on Ethiopian National Television. Meklit’s work has been covered by the New York Times, BBC, CNN, NPR, the Washington Post and many more.
Korean Performing Arts Institute of Chicago (KPAC) is a community-based cultural and educational organization dedicated to promoting traditional Korean performing arts. Its mission is to strengthen Korean American community, advance cross-cultural understanding and facilitate collaboration among diverse groups through traditional music. KPAC has five professional musicians from Korea to secure the quality of performance and education. KPAC annually provides more than 80 performances to more than 25,000 audiences.
aja monet is a surrealist blues poet, storyteller, and organizer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She won the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam poetry award title in 2007 and aja monet follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets participating and assembling in social movements. Her first full collection of poems is titled, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter on Haymarket Books. Her poems explore gender, race, migration, and spirituality. In 2018, she was nominated for a NAACP Literary Award for Poetry and in 2019 was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry for her cultural organizing work in South Florida. aja monet cofounded a political home for artists and organizers called, Smoke Signals Studio. She facilitates “Voices: Poetry for the People,” a workshop and collective in collaboration with Community Justice Project and Dream Defenders. She is currently working on her next full collection of poems entitled, Florida Water. aja Monet also serves as the new Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls.
The mission of Motus Theater is to create original theater to facilitate dialogue on critical issues of our time by using the power of art to build alliances across diverse segments of our communities by increasing awareness, shifting attitudes, and inspiring action towards a more equitable and just country. Since its founding in 2011, Motus has developed multimedia educational performances exploring U.S. history through the lens of race and class; and monologue performances in which Motus’ Artistic Director collaborates with people who are marginalized, misrepresented or underrepresented to write and present artfully crafted autobiographical stories to open hearts and minds.
Motus’ approach to supporting a productive shift in the immigration debate has been to help undocumented immigrants tell powerful stories about their hopes, fears, family, and contributions to our country. Motus weaves these stories with live music that augments the beauty, tenderness and courage of each story, and supports the audience in feeling the full impact of the narrative. Pairing monologists with dominant culture leaders to amplify their voices has proven to be a successful advocacy strategy because people shift attitudes not based on statistics or policy conversations, but based on new experiences and relationships. The stories shared are the conduits through which citizens, who are not personally in relationship with undocumented people, come to learn the impact of aggressive immigration policies.
Ozomatli's music is as multifaceted as its members and influences. Meeting as young political activists and musicians, the original band formed in Los Angeles in 1995 to play a notorious urban-Latino-and-beyond collision of hip hop and salsa, dancehall and cumbia, samba and funk, merengue and comparsa, East LA R&B and New Orleans second line, Jamaican ragga and Indian raga— all while following a key mantra: it will take you around the world by taking you around Los Angeles. Their music has been recognized and celebrated widely -- having won four Grammy Awards, serving as official US Cultural Ambassadors playing to audiences around the world, and here in the City of LA, April 23rd is designated Ozomatli Day in recognition of their immense contribution to the cultural life of our city. Over the course of Ozomatli’s 25-year career, the group has sold hundreds of thousands of albums, consistently sold out concerts around the world, and performed on numerous noted TV shows, including The Today Show, Jimmy Kimmel, Tonight Show w/Jay Leno, and Austin City Limits. The band also stars in Drew Barrymore’s Never Been Kissed and has been featured on PBS Kids.
Thai Angels Dancers of Thai Culture Foundation in Las Vegas, NV have performed traditional Thai dance together for over seven years. Their artistry has been featured at major cultural functions such as the CNY in the Desert Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations, Pacific International Expo, various charitable events at Thai temples, and for special performances for the Royal Thai Consulate General and several elected representatives of NV. When the Thai Angels are not performing, they are involved with charity work; since the pandemic, they have hand-crafted beautiful face masks for the LVMPD, the Nevada Injured Police Officer Fund, and families in need.
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, and a Cave Canem fellow, she holds an MFA from the New School. Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. She is a 2019 recipient of Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship and a 2018 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. In addition to appearing in journals and anthologies, her work has been translated into Arabic, Japanese, Estonian, Portuguese, and Greek, and commissioned by Under Armour and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology “Halal If You Hear Me” (Haymarket Books, 2019).