Amoke Kubat is a writer and multi-genre artist. She remains curious about self, as an older African American woman, the natural world, and the Sacred. She is reclaiming an African Indigenous Spiritual sensibility to reconnect Black people to the natural world, as practice for holistic wellness. Self taught, Amoke uses artmaking and writing to continue to define herself and hold a position of wellness in an America sick with inequalities and inequities. Her first play, "ANGRY BLACK WOMAN & Well Intentioned White Girl" continues to tour in the Twin Cities and to rural Minnesota cities. She debuted “Old Good Pussy and Good Old Pussy” at Pillsbury House January 15-25, 2020. Amoke is the creator of YO MAMA’s The Art of Mothering Workshops and YO MAMA’S HOUSE Cooperative.

Playwright, poet, and writer, Marcie Rendon is an active member of the local Native arts community. Rendon, Anishinabe, enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, aims to research the causes and effects of the disproportionate rates of incarceration of Native American women in Minnesota during her time at WAM.

Rosy Simas, (enrolled member of the Seneca Nation) is a dance and transdisciplinary artist. Simas’ work weaves themes of personal and collective identity with family, sovereignty, and healing. Simas creates dance work with a team of Native and BIQTPOC artists, driven by movement-vocabularies developed through deep listening. She is carried through her life and work by the many generations of family who were and are Seneca, Stockbridge-Munsee, Oneida, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Neutral, and of European descent. This extensive knowledge of her family and lineage is the underpinning of her relationship to culture and history – stored in her body – which is expressed through her work – of moving people, moving image, and moving objects that she makes for stage and installation. Simas’ dance works include Weave, Skin(s) and We Wait In The Darkness, which have toured throughout Turtle Island. Simas’ installations have been exhibited at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum, Colorado College, All My Relations Arts, and Soo Visual Art Center. Simas is a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Choreography Fellow, Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellow, McKnight Foundation Choreography Fellow, Dance/USA Fellow, USA Doris Duke Fellow, a recipient of a Joyce Award from The Joyce Foundation, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award, as well as multiple awards from NEFA National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and NPN. Simas is the Artistic Director of Rosy Simas Danse and three thirty one space, a creative studio for Native and BIPOC artists in Minneapolis.

In this unique collaboration, artists Rachel Breen and Vienne Chan will collaborate with Susanna Gibbons of the Carlson School of Management and her students at the Carlson Funds Enterprise, and together learn how to combine financial and artistic thinking to create a shared positive vision for the future. Through the Carlson Funds Enterprise course, students get the opportunity to manage $35 million of real investment money. Rachel and Vienne will inject creative elements into the class that will challenge traditional modes of decision making, and deepen discussions around the values and consequences of their financial investments, enhancing everyone’s sense of social responsibility for decisions made in class and in the “real world.”

Inspired by the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal and the associated technologies of weaponizing masses of data to manipulate public opinion, artists Emily Gastineau, Billy Mullaney, and Rachel Jendrzejewski will use performance to to investigate data as a tool for manipulation of democracy. Particularly interested in the ways aesthetic and performative forms combine with psychology, technology and law to create push-polling, gerrymandering, and social media manipulations, the team will investigate questions that challenge representation and the political, ethical, and performative aesthetics of participation.