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Survivor Love Letter

FOUNDER & DIRECTOR

Tani Ikeda is an Emmy winning director who creates narratives, documentaries, music videos, and commercial films. She was recently selected as one of Sundance’s 2018 intensive screenwriting lab’s fellows and was also named one of Film Independent’s 33 Emerging Filmmakers as a Project: Involve Directors Fellow. Ikeda was an Executive Producer and Director on the Blackpills Documentary TV Series “Resist” with Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors about the fight against LA County’s 3.5 billion dollar jail plan. At the age of 21, Tani Ikeda co-founded imMEDIAte Justice, a nonprofit that fosters the talents of young women artists working in virtual reality. She is the current executive director of imMEDIAte Justice and was named one of the “25 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World,” by the Utne Reader. Ikeda tours the country speaking at universities and national conferences about storytelling as a tool for social justice. Tani holds a Bachelors Degree in Film Production from the University of Southern California and currently resides in Los Angeles. (@taniikeda)

PUBLIC ARTIST & CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Jess X. Snow is a queer asian-canadian public artist, filmmaker, poet and educator. As a result of the rootlessness and migrations that marked her childhood, she developed a stutter which she overcame through her discovery of visual and written language. Her work explores survival, memory, joy, and our relationship to the Earth by amplifying the voices of women, queer people of color, and migrants who refuse to be defined by borders and time. Her work has been supported by the Tribeca Film Institute Migration Co/Lab, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific Center, and has appeared on PBS Newshour, The LA Times, and NBC Asian America and outdoor walls across the country. Through film, mural-making, poetry and youth art education, she is working toward a future where queer, migrant youth of color may see themselves heroic on the big screen and the city walls & then can face the possibility to grow up and create their own. (@jessxsnow)

PUBLIC ARTIST & ART DIRECTOR

Layqa Nuna Yawar is a migrant latinx artist, large scale muralist, agitator, educator and organizer born in Ecuador and based out of Newark, NJ. He migrated to the USA from Cuenca, Ecuador during one of the country’s most severe economic and political periods of instability in the late 1990’s. He works in a range of mediums, including studio painting, public murals, installation, project curation, sculpture, public art and street interventions. His work has been written about in The New York Times, The Star Ledger, The Huffington Post, NBC Latino, Fusion, Brooklyn Street Art and other publications, books and online. The artist’s practice also extends to curation, project production, mural-making workshops and educational lectures through spaces like El Museo del Barrio, Rutgers University and The Newark Museum as well as projects like Creative Art Works in New York City, City Without Walls in Newark and Conect Arte with the UN World Food Program in El Salvador. (@layqanunayawar)

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