Program Assistant, East-West Center Arts Program

Discipline: Folklife/Traditional Crafts&Visual Arts

Leonard Leon is a multidisciplinary artist whose practices stem from Pacific cultural values and heritages. As a carver, photographer, graphic designer, and a filmmaker, Leon leverages visual arts to invoke conversations on shared cultural practices as well as for interpretive storytelling. As a Marshallese, Leonard was raised in a family with great respect and love for the ocean. Later moved to the Northern Mariana Islands, Leon was adopted and raised by Francisco Babauta and his Chamolinian family. In this family, he was taught the value and respect for land, where he spent many years tilling native fruits and medicinal plants in the former botanical garden, Fruitland, now an abandoned mall in Saipan.

Leonard Leon is a photographer, filmmaker, cultural jewelry artist, and lifelong creative who draws influence from around the Pacific. Originally born and raised in the Marshall Islands, Leon moved to the Commonwealth of the Mariana Islands (CNMI) as a young man and grew to admire the indigenous Chamorro and Refaluwasch cultures he encountered while living in Saipan, CNMI. Leon has a BA in Creative Media with a Minor in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. On Saipan, Leon is best known creatively for the series of photos and stories he collected of the island in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Yutu.

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Leta Harris Neustaedter is a musician and actor who founded Metamorphosis Performing Arts Studio, where she integrates life skills into arts education. She has directed musical theater camps, Make-A-Movie camps, and created three seasons of Chill Skillz, an educational sketch comedy series. Neustaedter collaborates with the Boise High Orchestra on an ongoing program called Music That Matters, performs at local venues, and sings with the Boise Philharmonic Chorale.

She is a Certified Change Leader with the Idaho Commission on the Arts and a juried member of Music to Life. Neustaedter composed the musical underscoring for all 70-plus episodes of her podcast, The Lovely Afro, an archive of stories from the BIPOC community.

Last year, she produced, directed, and starred in a reading of a Lynn Nottage play. She also served as bandleader and pianist for a production of Lizzie. Neustaedter was one of nine recipients of the 2024 National Alliance for Musical Theatre New Writer Residency Grant for her original musical, for which she has since completed two drafts.

Executive Director, Chelmsford Center for the Arts

Lexy Lattimore is an artist, director, and social worker. She recently became the Executive Director for the Chelmsford Center for the Arts (CCA). She is the first person of color to serve as the head of a department in Chelmsford, MA, her hometown.

Lexy was a Mandel Leadership Fellow at Case Western Reserve University where she studied healing-centered community building through the arts. Lexy’s masters in social work focused on community trauma and resilience and influenced her place-keeping and resiliency work in Cleveland’s historic Hough and Glenville neighborhoods. Project highlights include working with Cleveland teens to produce a performance educating neighbors on redlining and involving them in a zoning project to “”undesign”” redlining; facilitating storytelling workshops that fueled a major roadway improvement plan; and, supporting youth to create theater about community safety, violence, recovery, and perseverance.

In addition to her community practice, Lexy has had an extensive career as a dancer, performer, and storyteller. She has performed with two contemporary ballet companies and has traveled to Cuba, Spain, Italy, and Australia, sharing her love for dance with the world. She has produced her own work in NYC, Boston, Durham, and Cleveland. Lexy graduated cum laude from Duke University with a Bachelor’s in History and honors in Dance. She is the recipient of the Cleveland Arts Prize Verge Fellowship.

Born in Nanjing, China, and raised in Portland, Oregon, Lianna Hamby holds a bachelor’s degree in Studio Art and a master’s degree in Museum Studies. Lianna is a public art administrator in Boise, Idaho and through her work she is able to support local, regional, and national artists, prioritize and uplift community input, and develop opportunities that result in artwork and experiences that can be enjoyed by all members of the public. Lianna is drawn to the fact that public art is not static – every interaction with public art adds to the growing and evolving story of the artwork, as well as the overarching story of Boise. By facilitating collaboration between artists and community members, she supports public art that reflects and shapes what Boise is, what Boise has been, and what Boise can be. In doing her part to help shape the cultural landscape, Lianna strives to uplift and amplify unheard voices. She hopes that in asking Boiseans to confront narratives that are unfamiliar and unlike their own, she encourages empathy, deeper connections, and ultimately a more equitable community.

Lights Camera Discover

Lily Hope, LLC

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Limina Arts Foundation Inc

Living Jazz

Lofanitani Aisea is a Black Indigenous interdisciplinary multimedia experimental performance artist, filmmaker, and storyteller. She is Modoc, Klamath, Tahlequah, Black, and Tongan. Aisea’s work combines film, movement, and sound to transform cultural memory into immersive experiences, centering joy as a radical act of reclamation.

Using an experimental lens, she examines identity, intergenerational storytelling, and the ways histories are archived, embodied, and reimagined.

Log Cabin Literary Center, Incorporated

Founder/Executive Director, AfroMundo

I am a daughter of a man who at 19 ruptured ancestral links and converted to Christianity in 1937, the very year Dominicans who shared his polytheistic faith or were Black as he were massacred alongside an estimated 15,000 to 35,000 others profiled as Haitian.

I am the daughter of an Afro-Indigenous Dominican woman who only on the sly admitted she inherited an ability to commune with spirits.

From both parents I learned of the complexities of identity, of the plight of those who stray from the normative and prescribed, of the need for narratives that honor lived experiences and counter whitewashed histories.

My art and cultural activism center the voices and histories of Afro-Latinx erased although 2/3 of an estimated twelve million who survived the trans-Atlantic slave trade were shipped to Spanish speaking America where slavery persisted for about 350 years.

My novel Geographies of Home explores racial identities. My upcoming nonfiction book Beyond the Pale won a PEN America 2019 Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History.

Beyond that I am a native of Quisqueya divvied by colonialism into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I am an immigrant and an American whose Latinidad and Americaniidad are called into question due to race. I am a sister, aunt, friend, scholar, cultural activist who believes in community. I also believe art is a form of restorative justice able to nurture the soul, spark informed dialogues, address inequities, and foster collective healing.

Discipline: Folklife/Traditional Arts

Loida Maritza Pérez is the Founder and Executive Director of AfroMundo. A native of the Dominican Republic, she is an independent scholar, cultural activist and author of Geographies of Home, a novel published in the United States and abroad. Her upcoming book, Beyond the Pale, won a PEN America 2019 Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History. Her work has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Latina, MaComere, Meridians, Edinburgh Review, Bomb, Callaloo and Best of Callaloo. A 2022-2023 National Leaders of Color Fellow, she has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts in collaboration with University of New Mexico and Rutgers University, IC3-Institute for Communities, Creativity and Consciousness, Djerassi’s Henry Louis Gates Fellowship, Ragdale Foundation for the Arts U.S.–Africa Writer’s Project, MacDowell Arts Colony, Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, Millay Arts Colony, Ucross Foundation and Villa Montalvo.