Discipline: Multidisciplinary

hú-tu (Laura 嘟嘟 and huiyin zhou) is an artist duo with backgrounds in social practice and anthropology, working across moving image, photography, performance, publishing, and collaborative writing. They have been awarded residencies and fellowships at The Luminary, Culture Push, Pedantic Arts, BRIClab, The Seventh Wave, and more. Follow their work at @huiyin.zhou and @lauradudupersonal.

Dedicated to multidisciplinary art and transnational organizing, Laura and huiyin co-founded and co-direct the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草. The Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective creates art to empower relational community healing. Their work investigates systems of discipline, control, censorship, and capitalist extraction while reimagining memory, memorials, rituals, intimacy, and queer/feminist kinship to (re)build sustainable community infrastructures. From punching sticky rice to channel queer feminist rage to collectively writing poems about grief and care, CAO’s work is deeply collaborative and continues to evolve within community. Their projects have been supported by the Snapdragon Fund, SEEK Raleigh, Asian American Arts Alliance, The New Breath Foundation, ChineseFeminism, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and many community members. Learn more at www.caocollective.com or follow @caocollective.

A self-described introvert with a very public profession, Dasan Ahanu is a North Carolina-based cultural organizer, artist, and scholar. As an accomplished cultural leader and poet, Dasan has appeared on NPR, TV One’s Verses and Flow, and the documentary Poet Son, among other features. He is a resident artist with the St. Joseph’s Historic Foundation/Hayti Heritage Center, co-founder and managing director of Black Poetry Theatre, and a visiting professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, teaching Hip-Hop and Black culture courses. A respected recording artist, Dasan has collaborated with many Jazz, Soul, and Hip-Hop artists in North Carolina. He is an alumnus of the Nasir Jones Fellowship with the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. In 2023, he was named the 15th Piedmont Laureate for poetry. He has published extensively and is the author of five poetry collections. Dasan also works with organizations as a strategist and builder who uses art & culture as a foundation and framework for creative solutions to internal and external needs. An imagination worker, he develops programs, collaborates on projects, helps map out initiatives, coordinates resources, and fosters ideation with groups looking to increase impact and embrace possibilities.

Church of Clown

Circo Zero

City of Henderson Parks

City of Kent Arts Commission

City of Lakewood