Global South Movements 2023

joshua bee alafia started making films in high school and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a BA in Film in 1995. Since then he has been freelancing as a Cinematographer and Editor in World Cinema and writing and directing his own feature films. His cinematographer credits in documentaries include; Every Day Art in Cuba, We Just Tellin’ Stories: Rodessa Jones’ Medea Project, Making Tortillas with the Mayans, Besouro Preto, Behind the Green Line, the Road to Sao Tome, the Cuban Hip Hop All Stars, Dub Poet: Oku Onuora, Maybe Dreams Can Come True and Fashioning Peace in Kenya and Havana Habibi,. His editor credits include the documentaries Juneteenth Community, Maybe Dreams Can Come True, Louisiana Cane, and the Sundance Jury Award Winning Wet Dreams and False Images. He has shot music videos for Luciano, Bikram Singh, King David, 77 Klash and Poets; Ainsley Burrows and Queen Godis. His film credits as writer/ director include the Anti Vigilante, Bold As Love, Se Safando, The Seed, Let’s Stay Together(the film, not the series) and the award winning Cubamor. He is a founder and CEO of www.rootsflix.com; Art in the Spirit of Liberation, films devoted to expanding consciousness. joshua bee alafia resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez is an artist based between Miami and Havana. Her work features handcrafted 16mm film, digital video, and rudimentary projections, often using elementary or outdated technology. Her works include expanded cinema, visual art, installation, and media design for stage, and she has exhibited internationally in film festivals, museums, galleries, TV, outdoor projections, and on-stage collaborations, in locations such as Bangladesh, Canada, Cuba, France, Greece, Honduras, Israel, Nicaragua, Portugal, Spain, and various cities in the United States. Since the 1970s Ms. Rodriguez has been collaborating with artists to create multidisciplinary works that explore themes such as genetic memory, sexuality, ancestry, and projects rooted in nature.

Nereida Garcia Ferraz is a Cuban-born artist whose practice encompasses painting, photography, video, sculpture, and social art projects exploring identity and feminist themes, nature, beauty, and the physical world. Her work has been exhibited by or is in collections of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, The San Francisco Art Institute, The Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and MDC Museum of Art and Design, among many others.

She co-produced and directed the award-winning video documentary "Ana Mendieta: Fuego de Tierra." The film is in the collection of MOMA, Guggenheim Museum, Yale University, San Francisco Art Institute and many other Museums and Universities around the world.

YA LA’FORD (b. 1979, Bronx, NY) is an artist, educator, and foremost a transporter—working between the visual and the complexities of the human community with layered meanings—through a wide range of media including paint, sculpture, installation, video, and sound. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts from The Art Institute of Boston and also holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law.

As a first-generation American, she moves between her Jamaican heritage and vulnerable communities using the power of art as a universal language. Ya La'ford's mission is centered on creating art and experiences, which exist to immeasurably transform and revolutionize the social, cultural, and historic contexts of creative expression within the human journey.

Dr. Celeste Landeros is a professor of English and Humanities at Barry University, in Miami Shores, Florida USA, and chair of the Florida Folklife Council. She co-edited the dance studies anthology Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (Duke University Press) and has covered the South Florida arts scene as a scholar and critic for over 20 years, in Dance Research Journal, Small Axe, Opera News, the Miami Herald, and WLRN radio, and as staff writer and music editor at the Miami New Times, managing editor for LOFT magazine, and founding editor of Artburstmiami.com. Dr. Landeros is the founding director of Carnival Arts, with exhibitions at the Miami International Airport, a commission by the Faena Foundation, and grants from Miami-Dade County, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a performance artist, video-maker, classical soprano, and vocalist with the traditional Scottish and Irish band, Hag.

Mia Leonin is the author of four poetry collections: Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child (BkMk Press), Braid, Unraveling the Bed, and Chance Born (Anhinga Press), and a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). In 2022, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs awarded Leonin an individual artist’s stipend. Leonin has also been awarded fellowships from the State of Florida Department of Cultural Affairs for her poetry and creative nonfiction, Money for Women grants by the Barbara Deming Fund. Leonin has published poetry and creative nonfiction in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Guernica, Indiana Review, Witness, North American Review, River Styx, Chelsea, and others. Leonin teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. 

Paris-born Karelle Levy was raised in Miami by a Swedish mother and French-Tunisian father. She spent her childhood surrounded by arts and crafts, music, dance and fashion, which all play a role in her designs. Levy lost her fiber artist mother when she was 16 years old. This event led her to start her studies in textiles at University of Miami continuing education Weaving class. She then went on to study textile design at Rhode Island School of Design, where she knit and wove fabrics for garments and costumes worn during her art performances. The costumes became the impetus for KRELwear, a fashion-forward collection of couture and ready to wear. Karelle Levy’s awards and recognitions include Best Local Fashion Designer in the Miami New Times in 2005, 2010 & 2021, Style Wars National Champion 2008, Gen Art Fresh Faces of Fashion in 2004. KRELwear has garnered exceptional praise in The New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily, Lucky, Ocean Drive, 944 Magazine, The Miami Herald, Noise, amongst other fine publications. Her clothing has been seen on Nicki Minaj, Alanis Morissette, Latin Grammy’s Wisin Dancers, and on Nuestra Belleza Latina.

Since 2002, Miami based artist Tiffany Madera has become a figurehead in the dance world by re-coding traditional Egyptian raks sharki dance as a tool for empowerment and social justice. As a performer, professor, activist, museum professional, filmmaker, and non-profit leader, Ms. Madera combines a highly aesthetic approach and academic scholarship to tackle the questions of our day.

She offers a theory based, community inclusive and global south perspective to local placemaking in the production of films, workshops and cultural exchanges in Miami, NYC, Morocco and the Caribbean. Her expanded approach to the arts is nourished by her Afro-Chinese Cuban ancestry.

She holds a Master’s Degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University and a Master’s Degree in Performance Studies from New York University Tisch School of the Arts, both with a focus on intercultural dance and film.

GIna Margillo creates in the mediums of dance, video, performance, collage, conceptual art, improvisation, and poetry to tell stories, build connection, and deconstruct deep narratives of justice, history, and mortality. In the field of education entertainment, she has worked in Africa, Asia, South America and North America to produce television, radio and web series, documentary films, and concerts, for organizations such as the United Nations and Planned Parenthood as advocacy tools for social movements. Currently her dance for camera film Dolores: A Triptych and social justice short documentary, Overtown’s Living Legacy are in the film festival circuit. Currently she is an adjunct professor of communication for social change at Barry University and a life cycle officiant, creating ceremonies and ritual to bring authenticity and empathy to mark life’s milestones. She has recently reinvented herself as a bodhran player in a Scottish folk (punk) band called HAG.

F22 Studio’s Cara Pastore is a true culture capture creative with extensive photography experience and a flair for designing experiential spaces. She has traveled the globe documenting and creating content for international leaders, entertainment, and non-profit organizations. In tandem with producing memorable marketing images for Economic Development authorities, she has a vision for building community and elevating creative collaborations within the arts and cultural affairs. Raised in Rhode Island, educated in Liverpool, rooted in Miami, F22 Studio is currently based out of Atlanta Georgia.

Beatriz Ricco hails from Brazil, and has traveled and lived in many countries. She first discovered her love for photography, earning an A.S degree in 2000 from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. Later on, she was inspired by the middle eastern culture's artform of bellydancing and started a family with her Egyptian husband. When Ricco began working with Hanan Arts, she fell head over heels for Cuba. As a dancer and photographer, she is able to capture movements at the exact moment while taking beautiful images. Now living back in Brazil, Beatriz works with cacao and its traditional culture, making chocolate from scratch and restoring its original flavor along with its history.

Juana Valdes uses printmaking, photography, sculpture, ceramics, and site-specific installations, to explore issues of race, transnationalism, gender, labor, and class. Functioning as an archive, Valdes’s work analyzes and decodes experiences of migration as a person of Afro Caribbean heritage. Born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, Valdes came to the United States in 1971. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the Parsons School of Design (1991), her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (1993) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (1995). She is currently an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is represented in Miami by Spinello Projects.