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Power Participants
ASIA is a member of the world-renowned
Rock Steady Crew and is the founder of the B Boy Summit.
JASMIN BARKER is a youth organizer in the San Francisco
Bay Area.
BIG LEZ is known coast-to-coast as a co-host of BET's
"Rap City." She also works part-time as a radio personality for KKBT
"The Beat" of Los Angeles. Both a choreographer and dancer, Big Lez has
appeared in countless music videos, including Michael Jackson's 'Remember the Time,"
Heavy D's "Black Coffee" and LL Cool J's "Around the Way Girl."
 BOB
BRYAN,
among other things, is a film director, producer, director of photography and video camera
operator. He is the director/producer of several documentaries including the
multi-award winning Graffiti Verite
and GV2: Freedom of Expression?
 BOOTS
is a member of The Coup, the Bay Area's politically
charged hip hop group. According to writer Oliver Wang, The Coup's Marxist ideology
informs lyrics that represent the challenges confronting working-class African Americans
living in post-industrial Oakland. Those beats and rhymes also pose a serious
challenge to those emcees who claim the road to revolution is through capitalism.
Boots is an active member of the Young Comrades, an Oakland-based political action
committee dedicated to fighting what they see as racially unfair city ordinances.
BEN CALDWELL, the creative force behind KAOS NETWORK, a
new underground media house, has more than 20 years experience as a producer, director,
editor, writer and teacher in the theatrical, documentary and television field. KAOS
NETWORK is a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art technology facility (the only one of its kind
in South Central Los Angeles). It serves as a living resource for the community by
forging connections with other centers around the country and the world by engineering
teleconferencing community meetings via videophones. KAOS NETWORK also doubles as a
underground "haven" for street artists, rappers, dancers, singers, actors and
others in the Performing Arts.
 DAVEY D
is an on air personality and the
community director for the SF Bay Area's number one music station 106 KMEL. He's
been there for 8 years where he does the humorous Daily Hip Hop Reports which can be heard
6 times a day. Also, he is the websmaster for Davey D's Hip Hop Corner which is the largest, most technically
advanced active site on the internet that focuses on Hip Hop Music and Culture.
DUSK ONE is a DJ, youth organizer and educator.
He received his B.S. in Sociology from UCLA in June 1998 and is the Administrative
Assistant for the Cultural Studies in the African Diaspora Project. Dusk also is the
co-organizer for POWER MOVES.
 KAMAU
DAAOOD is a performance
poet, educator and community arts activist who is widely acknowledged as a major driving
force behind Los Angeles' black cultural renaissance. Kamau developed his literary
skills as a young member of the legendary Watts Writer's Workshop. His tenure as a
"word musician" with the Pan African People's Arkestra under the direction of
Horace Tapscott helped to shape his bebop flavored poetic approach.
LAKANDIWA M. de
LEON is a 22-year old
musician, writer and artist. Born and nurtured in Los Angeles, Lakandiwa is
currently earning his M.A. degree in Asian American Studies at UCLA. He plans to
pursue a career in teaching at the community college level and hopes to continue the
musical and artistic projects that he is working on. He is a co-editor of a local
literary zine called de[k]onstru[k] and helped co-produce a documentary film on
Pilipinos in hip hop called Beats, Rhymes and Resistance. He is also a
member of the Balagtasan Collective, a L.A.-based group that promotes activism through
art.
MBACKE DIOUM is a rap artist from Senegal who currently
resides in Los Angeles.
SANDRA "LADY
PINK" FABARA began exhibiting
paintings in art galleries while she was still in high school and, at the age of 21, had
her first one-person show. Born in Ecuador, the daughter of an architect, Fabara
moved with her family to New York at the age of eight. In the 1980s, she
distinguished herself as a talented woman in a macho world where art was created
surreptitiously during dangerous, nighttime forays into train yards and subway tunnels.
As the mainstream art world became interested in graffiti in the early 1980s, Lady
Pink easily made the transition from creating illegal paintings on subways to legal works
on canvas, and was included in all the important early group shows of the emergent style.
Her current work deals with violent "wolf pack" behavior of urban youth
gangs and the recent spate of attacks on innocent victims like gays, women and the
homeless.
RALPH FARQUHAR wrote the screenplay for
Krush Groove
(1985), a box-office success and major cross-over Hip Hop film. He currently writes
for the Moesha television show on UPN.
 S.H.
FERNANDO, JR. is the author of The
New Beats (1994) and a contributing writer to Vibe and The Source
magazines.
FAB 5
FREDDY
STEPHEN GOLDSTONE
is a DJ, community organizer, and educator,
born and raised in San Francisco. Stefan works in several community organizations,
fusing cultural media, political education, and organizing campaigns to expand the
liberatory possibilities of Hip Hop and urban cultural forms. In all his works,
including Local 1200, STORM and Proceed, he struggles to define a politics of
culture and a culture of political work which builds the leadership of women, people of
color and poor people.
KAREN GOOD, a Howard University grad, is an
Editor-At-Large for Honey magazine and contributes regularly to Vibe
magazine.
THOMAS
GUZMAN-SANCHEZ producer/director/choreographer/dancer, was
raised in Reseda, California, an unlikely place to be exposed to the underground dance
world. He has written Underground Dance
Masters: History of a Forgotten Era which documents the true history of
underground dance from 1970 to 1985. This project has spawned a documentary film
which will air on PBS this Spring.
 ICE-T
The "Original Gangster,"
Ice-T has had a long and varied Hip Hop career. Although born in Newark, NJ, Ice-T
was a major player in the California Hip Hop scene in the 1980s. From early on, he
has fused music with film: in the mid-80s he appeared in Rappin, Breakin
and Breakin 2 and also recorded the theme song for Colors. Ice was
thrust into the national spotlight when the NRA and police activist groups protested his
single, "Cop Killer" which was performed with the band Body Count.
Time-Warner refused to release the album which was later dropped on Priority Records in
1993. Ice-T's film repertoire includes prominent roles in New Jack City, Trespass,
and Surviving the Game, among many others. Although the 1997 television
show, "Players," was short-lived, Ice received great reviews, as usual.
 RAS
KASS has been called a rapper's rapper and a prolific emcee who can do
it all: write, freestyle and battle. And he earned this reputation with only two
indie singles, no major record label and no full-length album. Indeed, Ras Kass
marks the return of the "underground" artist. The Carson/Los Angeles
native recently released Rasassination which earned critical acclaim from
both the mainstream and independent Hip Hop media.
CHERYL KEYES specializes in popular culture and
African American music and is a leading authority on rap music, which was the topic of her
dissertation at Indiana University and will be the subject of her forthcoming book.
Keyes has published several articles on rap music in general and the role of women in rap
particularly. She is an assistant professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA and currently
teaches a course on rap music.
GEORGE LIPSITZ chairs the Ethnic Studies program at the
University of California, San Diego. He is the author of, among other texts,
Dangerous
Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (1994).
ALAIN "KET"
MARDUENA, a world
renowned graffiti artist, is the founder and publisher of Stress, a three year old urban lifestyles
magazine. Alain received his B.S. degree in graphic communication management and
technology from New York University in 1997. In addition to Stress
magazine, Alain is also responsible for launching the world's first Hip Hop journal,
Elementary.
MONIQUE MATTHEWS often wondered when she was a child growing
up in Harlem, "What if hip hop ruled the world?" Luckily for her and the
rest of us, it does. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from UCLA,
Monique worked as a case manager for substance abusing families and as a teacher in South
Central Los Angeles and Harlem, New York. Two years later, Monique returned to UCLA
to receive a Master of Arts in African American Studies and to pursue a PhD program in
Sociology. She quickly discovered that it was very hard to study hip hop in academia
because it is a vibrant culture continuously redefining itself. Hence, she left to
pursue a career in writing. Her work has appeared in Rap Pages, Vibe, SLAM,
Notorious and Honey, among others. She is currently
pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in film at UCLA.
KIERNA MAYO is the editor in chief of
Honey, a
groundbreaking entertainment, fashion and lifestyle magazine for young women with urban
lifestyles. She is a celebrated critic of urban pop culture and has been featured in
Essence, Vibe, Spin, Emerge, Rap Pages and
several daily and weekly newspapers. She was one of the first women editors at
The
Source magazine where she worked as senior editor from 1991 to 1994, playing an
integral part in the hip hop magazine's formative stages. In 1996, she wrote the
introduction to the first collection of essays on the life and death of Tupac
Shakur,
entitled Tough Love. Kierna is a graduate of Hampton University with
a B.A. in Mass Media Arts (concentration in print journalism).
MEDUSA was born and raised in California: from
Pasadena to Pomona to Los Angeles. She is the newest member of the Organized Noize
Crew (Outkast, Goodie Mob, etc.) and is an original member of the Los-Angeles based
Heavyweight Crew (Freestyle Fellowship, Volume 10, Ganjah K, etc.). On her first
long-awaited commercial release, Medusa breaks you off like only a heavyweight emcee can;
she not only comes with revolutionary vocal stylings but with a sincere and much needed
positive message. Among her musical influences are: The Dells, Stevie Wonder, Marvin
Gaye, Chaka Khan, The Bar-Kays, and Run DMC.
LA'TONYA REASE
MILES wanted to be a DJ when she was 12 years old
and a hip hop dancer when she was 16. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in English at
UCLA. She received her BA in English Language and Literature from the University of
Maryland, College Park in 1994. Her areas of interest include the representation of black
masculinity in popular culture, especially sports (basketball), film and music
video. LT is the co-organizer of POWER MOVES. GO SIXERS!
SHANI O'NEAL graduated from Spelman College in 1997, and
is currently enrolled in UCLA's Masters in African Area Studies Program. She spent last
year living and working in Central West Africa, where she witnessed the diasporic impact
of hip hop. Poet, activist and scholar, Shani wants to see hip hop continue striving to
reach its full potential as a medium for social change.
 CARLOS
"MARE 139" RODRIQUEZ is a graffiti
artist and electronic media publisher who has appeared in Style Wars and Graffiti
Verite.
FRANK SOSA is a Hip Hop promoter and organizer.
SPIE was born in San
Pancho, Califas. Among
other things, he is a graff writer, photographer/videographer, painter, student-teacher,
activist, cultural enthusiast/supporter and Defender. He was recently a part
of the collaborative Graff art show at the Martinez Gallery in NYC titled,
"Bodycount," which was the first East/West coast showing of this unity in a
gallery. SPIE also helped curate and paint in the Bay Area's first Graff art show,
"No Justice, No Peace: Word from the Underground."
 TYRIN
TUNER may be best known as "Caine," the anti-hero of Menace
II Society, but he has appeared in a number of other films and television shows: He
played "Cy" in Panther and most recently appeared in Belly,
Hype Williams' first feature film. Turner's television credits include "Hanging
with Mr. Cooper" and "In Living Color." His highly anticipated hip
hop album will drop on Rap-A-Lot Records this fall.
WANE was born in London but was raised at the
149th Street and Grand Concourse up in Da Bronx. The Bronx exposed Wane to graff
writing early on and he spent many a night bombing every train stop's rooftop from 149th
and 3rd Avenue in the South Bronx up to the last stop on the 2 line. In the late 80s
and early 90s he was turned on to airbrushed clothing and finally in 1996 he opened his
own "Writer's Bench Clothing Line."
JULIAN WARE, hailing from the Bay Area, has moonlighted
as a graduate student in UCLA's Geography department while following "the love
of [his] life." He is currently working on an authored volume engaging in
critical discussions of key themes facing the Hip Hop nation to be distributed soon on the
web at www.wareabout.com, and is in the final
stages of completing his dissertation.
S. CRAIG WATKINS is an Assistant Professor of Sociology,
African-American Studies and Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin
where he teaches courses on race, media and popular American culture. He is
the author of Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema
(The University of Chicago Press, 1998). His current book project continues his
interest in race and popular American culture and focuses specifically on the
transformation of sports and mass media. He has been selected as a Research Fellow
for the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, CA.
 N'BUSHE
WRIGHT, who grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, made an impressive film debut in the film
Zebrahead (1992),
in which she portrayed a Detroit inner-city teen in the midst of a stormy interracial
relationship. Following that role, she played Nicole in the critically claimed
Fresh,
also starring Samuel L. Jackson and Sean Nelson. Ms. Wright also had a memorable,
emotionally charged role in Dead Presidents directed by Albert and Allen
Hughes. After starring opposite Wesley Snipes in the 1998 summer hit Blade, N'Bushe
most recently starred in DJ Pooh's directorial debut, Three Strikes.
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