A collaboration between Authentic Arts and Media and Kenneth Rainin Foundation, are bringing in experts to answer your questions and dive deep into equity-related topics. This pilot is a new series that aims to demystify arts funding and grant making. April 6 Panel featuring Artists: Claudia Alick, Antoine Hunter, Laurel Lawson, Judith Smith AND Funders: Lane Harwell, Esther Grisham Grimm
Let’s Talk Panelists
Claudia Alick, ARTIST
Claudia Alick is a cultural producer, performer, and inclusion expert. Named by American Theater
Magazine as one of 25 theater artists who will shape American Theater in the next 25 years, Alick has served as the founding Artistic Director of Smokin’ Word Productions, is a NY Neofuturist alum,
published playwright, recipient of NYC Fresh Fruit directing award, TedXFargo speaker, the Lilla Jewel Award for Women Artists, featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and former Community Producer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. At OSF for ten years she produced events such as “The Every 28 Hours Plays”, “The Green Show”, The Daedalus Project, OSF Open Mics as well as producing/directing audio-plays with OSF such as the Grammy nominated “Hamlet”. Her personal projects include her podcast “Hold On…Wait for it”, vlog “This Week in Cultural Appropriation”, StreetPoetry, and one-person Show “Fill in the Blank” exploring disability and the medical industry. Claudia served on Oregon Arts Leaders in Inclusion, the steering committee of The Ghostlight Project, the steering committee for Black Theater Commons. She is currently managing content with The Crew Revolution black female leadership, serves as Co-president of the board of Network of Ensemble Theater, collaborated on Unsettling Dramaturgy (crip and indigenous international digital colloquium) and is on the advisory councils for the National Disability Theater, Howlround, and NW Arts Streaming Hub. Claudia Alick serves as founding executive producer of the transmedia social justice company CALLING UP JUSTICE whose projects include Producing in Pandemic, The Every 28 Hours Plays, We Charge Genocide TV, Co-artistic direction of The FURY Factory Festival, and consulting and advising funders and companies around the country.
Website: https://linktr.ee/callingupjustice
Antoine Hunter, Purple Fire Crow, ARTIST
Oakland native, Antoine Hunter aka Purple Fire Crow is an award-winning internationally known
African-American, Indigenous, Deaf, Disabled, choreographer, dancer, actor, instructor, speaker, producer and Deaf advocate. He creates opportunities for Disabled, Deaf and hearing artists, produces Deaf-friendly events, and founded the Urban Jazz Dance Company in 2007 and Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival in 2013. Awards include the 2023 USA Artists Fellowship, 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship, 2021 Dance Teacher Award, 2019 National Dance/USA fellowship recognized by the Mayor of Oakland, 2018 inaugural Jeanette Lomujo Bremond Humanity Arts Award and 2017 Isadora Duncan (Izzie) for BAIDDF. Hunter’s work has been performed globally and he has lectured across the U.S. including at Kennedy Center’s VSA, Harvard and Duke University, and the National Assembly of State Arts as an ambassador for social change. Hunter utilizes his company’s artistic talents to engage with audiences, empower Deaf and disabled communities, and advocate for human rights and access, working to end discrimination and prejudice. His shoe company DropLabs and Susan Paley released an innovative haptic product to help people feel music. Hunter curated 2021 Bay Area Deaf Arts at SOMArts, is a 2021 YBCA 100 honoree, is on the production team of Signing Animation actively working on inclusive films and serves on the boards of Dance/USA, BABDA, Museum of Dance and councils for CalArts Alumnx and Intrinsic Arts. In response to Covid-19 in July 2020, Hunter founded #DeafWoke, an online talk show that amplifies BIPOC Deaf and
Disabled stories as a force for cultural change.
Website: www.realurbanjazzdance.com
Laurel Lawson, ARTIST
Choreographer, designer, and artist-engineer: Laurel is a transdisciplinary artist making work which
imagines new kinds of experience, reinterprets traditional stories, and questions cultural assumptions.
Her performing arts career began in music before serendipity brought her to dance, where she found a
discipline combining her lifelong loves of athleticism and art. Featuring synthesistic mythology and
partnering, her work includes both traditional choreography for both disabled and nondisabled artists and novel ways of extending and creating art through technology and design.
Laurel began her dance career with Full Radius Dance in 2004. She is an artist and access & technology lead with Kinetic Light, the internationally acclaimed disability arts organization, co-founder and CEO of CyCore Systems, a boutique systems architecture & product design firm, and the director of Rose Tree Productions, where she choreographs transdisciplinary art and supports equity-centered arts work. Laurel’s latest project, in collaboration with Sydney Skybetter, is The Choreodaemonic Platform: as a multiply-manifesting choreo-computational performance which centers embodied knowings of interdependence as artists, audiences, and AI contend with human-mediated symbiotic and adversarial relationships between nature, art, and emerging technologies. This project is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation and has received a 2023 Creative Capital Award.
Website: http://laurellawson.com
Instagram: @ worldsoflaurel
Twitter: @ llcycore
Judith Smith, ARTIST
Judith Smith, a Founder and Director Emerita of AXIS Dance Company, is one of the world’s driving forces in physically integrated dance. Judith’s commissioned more than 35 works from the nation’s best choreographers; led the development of the field’s most extensive integrated dance education/outreach programs and created the first-ever National Convening on the Future of Physically Integrated Dance in the USA. She has been one of Theatre Bay Area’s 40 People That Have Changed the Face of Bay Area Theatre and received Dance/USA’s Honors Award in 2022.
Website: https://axisdance.org/about/
Esther Grisham Grimm, FUNDER
Esther’s career-long work in the arts encompasses museum and art education, administration, and
philanthropy. She is a writer/editor, plays the flute, serves as an equine therapy volunteer, and is a coach for National Arts Strategies Leadership Coaching program. She is the Co-Chair of the American Friends of the Vienna Museum Board of Directors and is a member of Chicago’s Cultural Advisory Council.
WEBSITE: https://3arts.org/pages/board-and-staff/
Lane Harwell, FUNDER
Lane joined the Ford Foundation in 2018, after serving as the founding executive director of the service
organization Dance/NYC for eight years. Prior to Dance/NYC, they held the senior development role at
the arts-wide advocacy group Alliance for the Arts. Lane’s early history includes a performance career
with American Ballet Theatre Studio Company and training at the Bolshoi Academy, School of American Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet. Lane is an appointee to New York City’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, the Arts Committee to the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP), and a New York State Blue Ribbon Commission. They co-chaired the PEP Arts Committee from 2018 to 2020.
Lane is past chair of the steering committee for the Dance and Performance Awards and the Arts
Committee of the Municipal Art Society, addressing the role of the arts in advancing more livable cities. They were a founding board member of the advocacy group New Yorkers for Culture and Arts and a founding committee member for Culture AID, a disaster relief effort for the arts and culture sector. They are a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Lane has an MBA from Columbia Business School, an MA in performance studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and a BA in philosophy from Princeton University.
WEBSITE: https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/people/lane-harwell/
Let’s Talk co-creator and host
Beatrice L. Thomas, Authentic Arts and Media
Beatrice Thomas is the multi-disciplinary artist, cultural strategist, social justice drag queen and creative producer behind Authentic Arts and Media. Whether through creative production, consulting or equity, diversity, and inclusion workshops, Mx. Thomas’ focus is on uplifting and centering queer, transgender, and POC voices, with special attention to creating queer-inclusive programming. They are a pillar of Drag Queen Story Hour, serving as SF Bay Area Director. They serve on the national board of directors for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals and have been named a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist for 2020. Beatrice is also the producing artist and star of Black Benatar’s Black Magic Cabaret, a touring circus cabaret exploring cultural allyship and authenticity.
WEBSITE: https://authenticartsandmedia.com/
Kenneth Rainin Foundation co-creator Ted Russell, Director, Arts Strategy & Ventures,
Kenneth Rainin Foundation Ted Russell is Director, Arts Strategy & Ventures for the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. Ted leads the Foundation’s strategic direction for the arts, supporting diverse, visionary artists and collaborating with artists, partners and funders to foster an equitable ecosystem. Prior to joining the Foundation, Ted was an organizational consultant who specialized in working with funders and BIPOC arts and cultural organizations. He also served as the Senior Program Officer for the Arts Program at the James Irvine Foundation from 2005-2016 and previously worked at several California nonprofit arts organizations in various management, marketing and fundraising roles. Ted holds a BA in mechanical engineering from Yale University and an M.B.A. in arts management from UCLA’s Anderson School. He served as the board chair of Grantmakers in the Arts in 2020 and 2021.