Opening Keynotes
Dee Hibbert-Jones is an Academy Award nominated, Emmy® award winning filmmaker for her documentary short film and internationally recognized artist. Her work incorporates animation, installation, public art and documentary film. Hibbert-Jones is a Guggenheim Fellow and a MacDowell Fellow. She was most recently awarded a United States Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award in recognition for her “outstanding national commitment to civil rights, and social justice.” The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University awarded Hibbert-Jones the 2015 Filmmaker Award with Nomi Talisman. She was awarded the California Public Defenders Association 2016 Gideon Award for support to indigent minorities. Her first short animated documentary Last Day of Freedom (co-directed with Nomi Talisman) won Best Short Documentary at the International Documentary (IDA) Awards 2015, a Northern California Emmy 2016 and was nominated for an 88th Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. The film screened internationally at over thirty international festivals and won twelve festival awards including: Best Short, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Best Short Documentary Hamptons International Film Festival, Golden Strands Award, Outstanding Documentary Short, Tall Grass KS, the 2015 Platinum Award Winner Spotlight Documentary Series, as well as the Award of Recognition at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards and was a CINE Eagle Award Documentary Short Finalist. Hibbert-Jones’ work is in the collections of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences, the DeRosa Preserve, Stanford University, Bennington College, University of North Carolina, University of California, Santa Cruz, ArtsBlock UC Riverside, University of California, Berkeley, Duke University Library, Recology Artist’s Collection and the Savidge Collection at the MacDowell Colony. She is an Associate Professor of Art and Digital Art New Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and founder/ co-director of SPARC at UCSC a social and environmental arts Arts Research Center.
Nomi Talisman is an artist and filmmaker whose projects blend animation and documentary forms that challenge entrenched attitudes, unpack political issues and ask how people manage and who gets heard. Talisman is an Academy Award nominated filmmaker. Her film projects have screened at international film festivals and received multiple international awards including an Emmy, a Gideon Award, the 2016 Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award (nominee), a Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award, an IDA award for Best Short Documentary (with Hibbert-Jones). Among her festival awards are: Best Short Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Best Short Documentary Hamptons International Film Festival, Golden Strands Award, Outstanding Documentary Short, Tall Grass KS, Best Experimental Short, Atlanta Docufest, Impact Award (In) Justice for All, and the 2015 Platinum Award Winner Spotlight Documentary Series. Talisman has received commissions from the Academic Film Archive of North America, the Magnes Museum, the Israeli Council and the British Council. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Colony Fellow and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Fellow. She works full time as a freelance editor and animator.
Middle Keynote
Kevin Coval is a poet and community builder. As the artistic director of Young Chicago Authors, founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, and professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago—where he teaches hip-hop aesthetics—he’s mentored thousands of young writers, artists and musicians.
He is the author and editor of ten books, including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Schtick, and co-author of the play, This is Modern Art. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Drunken Boat, Chicago Tribune, CNN, Fake Shore Drive, Huffington Post, and four seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. Coval’s forthcoming collection, A People’s History of Chicago drops in April 2017 on Haymarket Books.
Closing Keynote
Daniel Arzola (born May 6, 1989 in Maracay, Venezuela) is a writer, visual artist, graphic designer, and defender of human rights who has popularized the term “Artivism.” He created “No Soy Tu Chiste” (I’m Not a Joke), a series of 50 posters that became the first viral Venezuelan campaign to reach five continents and be translated into 20 languages. Arzola’s work has been reviewed by press from Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Holland, and the United States. He has also appeared in Al Jazeera, Out Magazine, and The Advocate.
Arzola participated in Madonna’s project Art for Freedom, and was the only artist to have five of his works selected for the project’s global release; two of those works were selected by Katy Perry. Madonna went on to endorse Arzola on Twitter. His work has spread to major universities across North and South America, including Amherst College, the University of Georgia, and the University of Alberta. In December 2016 he won the Human Rights Prize at the International Queer and Migrant Film Festival for his theory of Artivism and the impact of his work. At age 18, Arzola was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Today he resides in Santiago, Chile.