Founder and Director

Arielle Julia Brown

Arielle Julia Brown is a multidisciplinary cultural worker who commands and directs cultural spaces as sites for radical imagination, vision building and social transformation in her communities.

Raised between Hayward California and Conley Georgia by her beloved migratory people, Arielle now also calls Philadelphia, PA home. Arielle’s practices traverse cultural strategy, performance curation, dramaturgy, facilitation and performance making. Arielle’s work as a cultural worker calls forward spaces for truthtelling the likes of which continue to make expansive space for Beloved Community. Across her efforts, Arielle is committed to supporting and creating Black performance work that commands imaginative and material space for social transformation. 

Woven throughout her cultural work, Arielle teaches and facilitates workshops across various cultural and academic spaces. As a facilitator she has been most transformed by her work on The Love Balm Project, a workshop series and performance that centers the testimonies of mothers who have lost children to systemic violence (2010 -2015 - more information below). Additionally, Arielle has taught performance at; Destiny Arts Center, Streetside Stories, Eastside Arts Alliance and Liberation Songs (at Morehouse College). She has been a guest lecturer at the Pomona College Department of Theatre and Dance. Arielle has facilitated workshops and or served on panels at Open Engagement, Common Field, Highlander Homecoming, ROOTS Weekend Atlanta, Theatre Bay Area Conference, College Art Association Conference, Alliance of Artist Communities, ASWAD and several others. Recent dramaturgy credits include What We Ask of Flesh by Christal Brown/INSPIRIT (Jacobs Pillow Residency (2021), Grounds That Shout curated by Reggie Wilson (Philadelphia Contemporary 2019), Salt Peper Ketchupby Josh Wilder (Interact Theatre/ Passages Theatre 2018)

Arielle was recognized by Intersection for the Arts as as 2014 Changemaker. She was a Mellon Artistic Leadership Fellow for the 2014 Encuentro at LATC. She was a 2017-2018 Inaugural Diversity and Leadership Fellow at Alliance of Artists Communities. Arielle was a 2019 Monument Lab National Fellow. Arielle is a 2021 Leeway Transformation Awardee. Arielle is in the inaugural cohort (2021 -2023) of Called By Water conceived and led by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and Sharon Bridgforth. Arielle received her B.A. in Theatre from Pomona College and holds an M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University where she was the 2015-2017 Public History of Slavery Graduate Fellow with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. To learn more about her work visit her website here. 

Associate Producer

Tafari Diop

Tafari Diop Robertson  is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary artist, cultural producer, and speculative historian with expertise in event programming, graphic design, and multimedia. His work investigates the dynamics of Black cultural production and sovereignty through a Pan-Africanist lens. Often Robertson’s work is found through site specific media installations and community engagements. Utilizing anti-work methodologies, he meanders through a process including but not limited to kite-flying, illustration, relationship building, radical organizing, writing, and administrative critique.

Most recently, Robertson developed the Black Historians’ Department to explore a speculative historiography that prioritizes the ways that Black peoples hold and exchange information amongst ourselves, often outside the spectre of institutional control.