What would it take to imagine a radical society where people are able to exercise their freedom to move and their freedom to stay? What does that culture look like? How does imagining such a time and place inspire us to take steps toward making that a reality for artists and beyond?
Join Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) and Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR) on Tuesday, June 6, 2023, at 2pm EDT/11am PDT for a 75-minute webinar, daring funders to imagine what is possible, and moving them to take action.
We will be joined by Nayantara Sen, lead designer, Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategies, and director of Field and Funder Learning, Pop Culture Collaborative; Terry Marshall, founder and creative director, Intelligent Mischief & Black Migrant Futures Design Lab, and Nick Szuberla, executive director and co-founder, Narrative Arts. They will discuss:
- the power of storytelling to shift and build narratives and how artists are at the helm of this work;
- common misconceptions and narratives within, and about, newcomer communities and beyond; and
- ways arts funders can be more nuanced in their support towards narrative shift and narrative change with an immigrant justice lens.
This webinar will be moderated by Cairo Mendes, director of state and local programs, Grantmakers Concerned for Immigrants and Refugees, and Sherylynn Sealy, senior program manager, Grantmakers in the Arts.
Live captioning will be available in English throughout the webinar. For additional accommodation requests, please contact GIA Senior Program Manager Sherylynn Sealy, at least three (3) business days prior to the event.
A recording of this webinar is now available!
Presenters
Terry Marshall, founder and creative director, Intelligent Mischief & Black Migrant Futures Design Lab
Terry Marshall is an artist, writer, cultural innovator, creative strategist, and cultural studies scholar living in Brooklyn, NY, by way of Barbados and Boston. He has 25 plus years of experience as a labor and cultural organizer and previously founded the Hip Hop Media Lab and Streets is Watching. His work focuses on the intersection of social movement history and theory, transformative experience design, social scenes and the role of parties and festivals as drivers of social and cultural change. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab Civic Media Fellowship and is an alumni of the Laundromat Project Creative Change Fellowship. He was a member of the design team of the Constellations Fund. Terry loves movies and comics and is a #WalkingDead superfan.
Nayantara Sen, former lead designer, Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategies & current director of Field and Funder Learning, Pop Culture Collaborative
Nayantara Sen is a first-generation Bengali immigrant, a trilingual storyteller and fiction writer, a narrative and cultural strategist, and a political educator. She is the Director of Field and Funder Learning at the Pop Culture Collaborative, and the Lead Designer and Narrative Strategist for the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy at Race Forward. At the Collaborative, she supports learning immersions, capacity building and partnerships across a broad field and funder learning portfolio, advises on narrative Labs and cohorts, and incubates two emerging projects – Culture Change U (a narrative and cultural training and learning institute) and Project Azaadi (a national network of narrative and cultural strategists and practitioners). Nayantara has worked for over 15 years at the intersections of narrative, arts and culture, immigration, racial and gender justice, systems change, movement strategies and innovation. She was previously the Director of Narrative and Cultural Strategies at RaceForward. She is author of Creating Cultures and Practices for Racial Equity: A Toolbox, the widely taught Cultural Strategy Primer, and more recently, Stories for Change with Storyline Partners, which equips pop culture for social change professionals with tools to integrate equity practices into content development, production, and post-production. She is the creator and lead designer of the New York City Racial Equity in the Arts Innovation Lab, a 2-year intensive that taught 60 NYC arts-producing organizations and museums to operationalize racial and cultural equity strategies
Nick Szuberla, executive director & co-founder, Narrative Arts
Nick Szuberla has helped design and lead national public information campaigns on issues ranging from sentencing reform to U.S. energy policy. He began his work at the Highlander Research and Education Center in 1996, and then joined Appalshop, an arts and cultural center in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Not long after, Nick founded Holler to the Hood (a multimedia project exploring urban/rural relationships), Thousand Kites (a national dialogue project addressing the U.S. criminal justice system) and Calls from Home (an interactive radio and organizing project). He has produced award-winning documentary films, radio series, and multimedia productions. He has also trained hundreds of youth and adults in how to use low-cost media as an organizing tool, and has done artist residencies in 38 states. He is a graduate of Antioch College.
