MORE ABOUT THE WORKSHOP AND PERFORMANCE COLLABORATORS

The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company DAYPC is a multi-racial group of teens that collaborates with professional artists to create dynamic, original productions. Combining hip hop, modern and aerial dance, theater, song, and rap, company members take the stage to tell stories that stem from their lived experiences and express their visions for a world transformed. Since 1993, DAYPC has performed original work for up to 25,000 audience members annually, garnering critical acclaim and widespread community support for both their technical prowess and their commitment to advancing inclusivity, equity, and justice. In 2017, DAYPC received the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award, the nation’s top honor for creative youth development programs.

The Destiny Junior Company (DJC) DJC was founded in 2009 as DAYPC’s younger counterpart. Following a supportive audition process much like DAYPC’s, each fall fifteen 9-12 year olds are chosen to spend the academic year cultivating their artistic voices and building technical vocabulary in dance, theater, and performance. These young visionaries join DJC Artistic Director, Destiny Mentor teaching artist, and DAYPC alumna Mika Lemoine in co-creating portions of DAYPC’s annual production as well as original works that they perform at various venues throughout the year.

Rashidi Omari Rashidi Omari is known for his magnetic mashups of traditional dance styles. Hip Hop, B-Boying, Popping, Locking, Dancehall, Lindy, House, modern, and jazz are integral parts of his extensive repertoire. Performing professionally since 1998, he has danced with DREAM, Avatar Flux, Adia Whittaker Dance Company, Liberation Dance Theater, Joanna Haigood, and Kiandanda Dance Theater among others.  Rashidi Omari is the head choreographer and co-director of the Oakland-based Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company. A gifted educator with over 14 years teaching experience, he offers classes and workshops nationally and internationally.

See Through Soul See Through Soul, created in 2017, is an emerging dance company based in Oakland, CA. Directed by Mika Lemoine and Sheila Russell, this fresh and soulful company uses movement to express self, seek truth, and examine relationship dynamics. The eclectic group draws inspiration from various street and club dance styles including Hip Hop, House, Vogue and Waacking as well as Contemporary Dance and elements of Tap.

See Through Soul has performed work at Nasty Humans, a multi disciplinary collection of performances at PianoFight and WILD, at Root Division, the De Young Museum, and Yoshi’s.

DJ RikiRain After throwing events that merged genres, scenes, and art to benefit local youth organizations with Inspire Productions in Washington, D.C. in the 90's and 00's, RikiRain continues to bring her love of music and booty shakin' bass to the Bay with mixes that span soulful house to breaks and beyond.

Samara Atkins Samara is Associate Artistic Director and Co-founder of Mix’d Ingredients, a teaching artist at the Destiny Arts Center, and choreographer with Alphabet Rockers. Samara has performed in various dance companies including New Style Motherlode, Diamond Dance Company, Neopolitan, Dance 10, St. Mary's Dance Ensemble, Vizion Performance Team, Carla Service's Dance-A-Vision, as well as with LUAM, whose choreographer credits include Busta Rhymes, Nelly Furtado, and Rihanna. Traveling to Mexico, China, Thailand, Nepal, and Vietnam to showcase, teach, and share her love of dance with other cultures, her passion is to perform and teach youth and the community to freely express themselves with confidence. She teaches adult and youth hip-hop classes around the Bay Area and also is currently a hip-hop columnist for Dance Studio Life Magazine.

Yasunori Nomura Yasunori Nomura is a theoretical physicist working on particle physics, quantum gravity, and cosmology. He is a Professor of Physics at University of California, Berkeley, a Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a Principal Investigator at Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo, Japan. Since 2015, he has been the Director of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics. He developed theories of grand unification in higher dimensional spacetime and proposed that the eternally inflating multiverse is the same thing as quantum many worlds. In 2017, Nomura was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for pioneering contributions to a variety of areas of particle theory, including gauge unification in extra dimensions, electroweak symmetry breaking, supersymmetric models, dark matter, the multiverse, foundations of quantum mechanics, and black holes."

Mukund Subramanian Mukund Subramanian is a sound healer, cultural anthropologist and Japanese Moghusa practitioner. Holding a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, having partially grown up and lived in Japan for over 12 years, Mukund comes from a family of Carnatic musicians in Chennai, India, whose belief in the power of devotion, resonance and healing greatly inspires his practice. Currently, he is completing a manuscript on emotion, intuition, and the art of healing.  It is an exploration of our individual and collective journey to creatively heal and nurture healthy selves in the current global world.

Arisika Razak Arisika Razak teaches meditation at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland where she is the People of Color Sangha Core Teacher. She holds a Masters in Public Health from UC Berkeley, is a Certified Nurse Midwife, Performance Artist, and Spiritual dancer. She also teaches Community healing, Women’s health, Ritual and ceremony for individuals and groups, Diversity training, and Embodying the sacred.

Angie Wilson Angie Wilson mines seismic cultural shifts and the subtleties of consciousness in her textile-based sculpture and installations. Wilson uses yarn and light to draw on metaphors of weaving to illustrate phenomena of space and time. She explores matter and light, connecting the external universe and the worlds within ourselves, creating constellations of stars in various states of explosion and formation, death and birth. Her work investigates the parallels between stars and our cells as well as the metaphors of string and fabric to describe the universe.