Jeri Lynne Johnson is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra, a model for 21st-century American orchestras combining artistic excellence with cultural diversity and meaningful community engagement.

Black Pearl has been recognized as a leading innovator in classical music earning numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and is the only organization in the US ever to win three prestigious Knight Arts Challenge grants.

In 2005 she made history as the first Black woman to win an international conducting prize, the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship. Her consulting and presentations serve as a vehicle to offer strategic and creative solutions for organizations seeking to create a culture of belonging.

Offering:

Inspirational, interactive keynotes offering lessons from conducting and the orchestra to harness creativity, a vision of organizational unity in diversity, fresh takes on leadership, and strategic growth.

I’LL TAKE YOU THERE: Musical Journeys To Racial Justice

Equal parts live performance, lecture, and revival meeting, I’ll Take You There is a unique way of experiencing the impact of music on American culture, identity and social progress.

Through his unique blend of Down and Dirty Blues, Socially Conscious Soul, and Spirit Fueled Gospel Music, cultural activist, storyteller, and musician Eric Dozier takes you on a journey as he shines a light at the crossroads of music and American race relations by performing songs and discussing key musical moments from the Abolitionists, Civil Rights, labor & anti-war movements, as well as other contemporary voices of change both within the US and internationally. By the end, you’ll understand what it means to show the world what community SOUNDS like!

Masud Ashley Olufani is an Atlanta-based actor, mixed media artist, and writer whose studio practice is rooted in the discipline of sculpture. He is a graduate of Morehouse College, and The Savannah College of Art and Design.

He is the creative director of Blocked: A Global Healing Project, a multimedia performance created to memorialize spaces marked by the trauma of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He is the lead actor in No Cowards in Our Band, a film produced in collaboration with Syracuse Opera. The film tells the story of the great freedom fighter Frederick Douglass. It premiered on PBS affiliate WCNY in July 2021.

Masud is co-host with NPR’s Celeste Headlee and New Yorker Humorist Andy Borowitz, of Retroreport, a show providing historical context to today’s headlines, airing nationally on PBS. He is the visiting artist fellow at Emory University for the Fall of 2021.

Offering:

A mixed media keynote using music, visual, and theater arts, and multimedia storytelling to share the drama of our march towards oneness.

MOANIN' SONS, self-styled itinerant blues preachers of the gospel of brotherhood.

Black & white, North & South, old & new, sacred & everyday – these are the lines Moanin’ Sons were born to blur. This unlikeliest of duos has taken to the nation's backroads, churches, jails and juke joints, boardrooms and living rooms, using the language of music to mingle with people from all walks of life and search for the soul of America.

Their workshop, What’s Goin’ On: Music & Social Change converges at the crossroads American music and race relations. Share in an eclectic mix of story and song as seen through the lens of their long-time friendship and their electric performing style as roots/Americana duo Moanin’ Sons. You’ll be stomping your feet and clapping your hands as Eric Dozier & JB Eckl (Santana, Ozomatli) communicate and explore the racial landscape in ways that would be impossible through mere intellectual exercise.