The Collective

Artists

Lillian Dunn, Philadelphia | Circle Keepers

Lillian Dunn is a community arts organizer and somatic healing practitioner in Philadelphia. She's co-founder and executive editor emerita of all-ages Philly literary publication APIARY Magazine, now in its 11th year of publication; teaches poetry at New Pathways Project, an LGBTQ recovery space; and is a recipient of grants from the Leeway Foundation and the Velocity Fund for her arts-based community work. She's worked at The Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia for 7 years as an artist-in-residence program manager and writer. Lillian’s clinical practice includes psychodynamically-informed somatic work and energy healing, which she has studied and taught since 2014 at Inner Source Healing Arts in Malvern, PA. Lillian holds an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. She is serving as the Clinical Social Work Fellow at Swarthmore CAPS.

Folami Irvine, Philadelphia | Circle Keepers

Folami Irvine is a 5th-generation African-American herbalist, Philadelphia native, and U.S. Veteran devoted to making a positive change in her community; she has over 30 years of experience collaborating with inner-city youth and families in the area. She is the founder of Precious Jewels Prevention Program, a mentoring service designed to educate, support, and empower girls and women. She teaches an array of comprehensive approaches for health and wellness, education, social justice, and cultural preservation. She teaches multiple lifelong tools including herbalism, Iridology, Birthworks, Sister Circles, mentoring and many other Holistic healing techniques. Teaching families the culturally preserved traditions of the healing arts is her passion; In addition to providing a seamless continuum of services that strive to support our girls and women's social health and emotional well being, while raising self-awareness. She believes that through cultural preservation, people are forced to challenge their views and be open to positive experiences promoting self-empowerment.

Misty Sol, Philadelphia | Circle Keepers

Misty Sol creates art that explores Black people’s connections to nature, wellness, and speculation. Her paintings, children’s book illustration, stories, and eco-practice celebrate nuanced and diverse experiences of Black humanity. Since 2018, Misty has been the creative director of Tiny Farm Wagon. Misty's paintings had an international debut on the CBS sitcom Grand Crew in 2021. In 2022, her paintings were seen on the set of the Oprah Network's All Rise Season 3, now streaming. Misty Sol has a B.A. in Literature from Penn State University and an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College.

Elaine Lopez, Philadelphia

Elaine Lopez is a Cuban-American designer, researcher, artist, and educator whose work explores the intersection of culture, identity, equity, and Risograph printing within the field of design. Elaine acquired her BFA from the University of Florida (2007), and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2019), both in graphic design. She is currently a faculty member in the Communication Design program at Parsons The New School. Elaine has been awarded the AICAD Postgraduate Teaching Fellowship at the Maryland Institute College of Art where she taught in the undergraduate and graduate Graphic Design programs.

Dont Rhine / Ultra-red, Los Angeles | Philadelphia Principles

Dont Rhine co-founded the international sound art collective Ultra-red in 1994. While images determine much of our understanding of activist art, Ultra-red asks; What did you hear? Drawing on the traditions of popular education, militant inquiry, and musique concrète, Ultra-red has developed numerous long-term sound investigations with community groups and political struggles. Based in Los Angeles, Dont has collaborated with Clean Needles Now since 1992, now named LA Community Health Project. He is an organizer with the L.A. Tenants Union which he helped to found in 2015 and a part-time art instructor at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Harm Reduction Organizers & Facilitators

Raani Begum (Philadelphia Red Umbrella Alliance) | Philadelphia Principles

Raani Begum is a queer South Asian full service sex worker. She has also worked in other feminized labor sectors – such as childcare, health aide, and teaching – and writes and critiques from these experiences. In her research and writing, she focuses on culture, labor, and State suppression from a gendered lens. Her community organizing work focuses on community outreach in femme-centered street economies, anti-police work, harm reduction, and community oriented, restorative justice in Philadelphia, PA. She is a member of the Heaux History Project and an organizing member of the Philadelphia Red Umbrella Alliance.

Pamela Draper | Circle Keepers

Pamela Draper, MMT, MT-BC (she/her) is a master’s level, board certified music therapist, community worker and nonprofit manager who has lived in Philadelphia for the past 16 years. Since graduating with her master’s degree in 2013, Pamela has focused on building her knowledge and experience base around person-centered therapy, harm reduction and community music therapy (CoMT). Pamela has worked primarily in the Kensington section of Philadelphia for the past 4 years, focusing on public arts programming and developing trauma-informed safe spaces for community members, including those who are unhoused and using drugs. She has been a visiting lecturer at West Chester University, Temple University, Bryn Mawr College and University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Tri-State CoMT Collective, which she founded in 2022.

Lulu Duffy-Tumasz (Project SAFE) | Philadelphia Principles

Lulu Duffy-Tumasz has coordinated Project SAFE’s delivery network for over 3 years, providing people who use drugs and street-based sex workers with bulk harm reduction supplies that they then distribute in Kensington and throughout Philadelphia. Lulu is also a board member of Project Safe. They have been featured in The Nation and other publications, and have presented about harm reduction and sex work at the National Harm Reduction Conference and throughout Philadelphia.

Microgrant Recipients

Kevin Bass (Homies Helping Homies) | Community Photo Days

Kevin Bass is passionate about archiving his experience in his everyday surroundings. “As an artist, it’s important that I record for future generations and capturing experiences as they unfold. It’s on each of us to represent that.”

Mario Cabral (Homies Helping Homies) | Community Photo Days

Based out of Philadelphia, Mario Cabral is a Dominican photographer and creative using multiple formats of film to document an ever changing city. With a focus on street and architecture photography, having a keen eye for detail and making the most of capturing a moment while finding humour in how they view the world.

Essence Gaines (Decolonize Philly) | The Fight for a Land Revolution

Essence Gaines (she/her/they) is an avid reader and educator who wants to continue inspiring and increasing the reading skills of children, especially Black children. Prior to receiving her Associate degree in Black Studies from Community College of Philadelphia, she read books by Black authors to Black children for the Dover Street Library. More recently, they worked at Sankofa Freedom Academy Charter School as a Servant Leader Intern where they taught and empowered Level 1 students (children going to 1st and 2nd grade) using Sankofa's Summer curriculum Pathways to a Strong Future. They are excited to facilitate more educational spaces, many of which Decolonize Philly will provide its own people in our community.

Keyssh Datts (Decolonize Philly) | The Fight for a Land Revolution

Keyssh is a multimedia creator/community organizer from SouthWest Philly who uses the love of the past, the present, and Afro-futurism to help people learn and unlearn for the betterment of society and humanity.

Rosie Morales | Generational Feasting

Rosie Morales is an Oakland, CA-born, Philly-based artist who specializes in fine art centered on illustration and figurative painting. Inspired by traditional Northern Renaissance painters, indigenous and shamanic art, as well as outsider artists and low-brow painters, Morales uses classical rendering styles to investigate contemporary vision. A graduate of San Francisco Art Institute in 2011, she has since been involved with numerous non-profit arts organizations including The Uhuru Movement, and Mural Arts Philadelphia. Her practice is led by a drive to enhance youth voices and provide art and arts education to the community. She is currently pursuing a masters degree in Art Therapy Counseling at Drexel University.

Sabriaya Shipley | Generational Feasting

Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Sabriaya is a Philadelphia-based poet, educator, and community ethnographer determined to study, receive, and cultivate nontraditional performance/ art spaces centered around the expressive freedom of Black & Brown youth. Named a 2019 A+ Educator by Philadelphia Family Magazine and a 2021 Black Lives Matter Philly Educator /Fellow, Sabriaya holds a BA in Theatre from Temple University with concentrations in poetry as performance and poetic ethnography and a MA in Social Justice and Community Organizing from Prescott College. Sabriaya has collaborated as an educator, artist, and artistic advisor with several community-based organizations and art spaces such as Theatre Exile,  Power Street Theatre, the Painted Bride Art Center, the Colored Girls Museum, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Philadelphia Young Playwrights, New Voice for Reproductive Justice, Residency 11:11 in London, Girls Rock Philly, and Tree House Books where they served as a Literacy Program Director decolonizing access to literacy for Black & Brown North Philly Youth. They are a co-founder of Griot Girls, a youth writing collective for young Black girls. Her first publication “Somewhere Between God & Mammy” was released in January 2022. A recipient of the 2021-2022 Philadelphia Foundation and Forman Art's Initiative Art Works grant, Sabriaya is a citizen artist determined to represent the intersections of their community.

Project Management Team

Katie Price (Project Director & Associate Director, Lang Center)

Dr. Katie Price is Associate Director of Swarthmore College’s Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility and, by appointment, a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department. Price earned a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania and her work focuses on engaged scholarship, particularly in the arts and humanities; contemporary literature and creative writing; and socially engaged practice. From 2017-2019, Price co-directed Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary—a project that connected book artists with resettled individuals from Iraq and Syria to co-create new works of art and literature. Published works include the edited volume ‘Pataphysics Unrolled (2022); two chapbooks; and writing in such venues as Canadian Literature, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and FENCE. 

Jordan Landes (Project Co-Director & Curator of Friends Historical Library)

Jordan Landes, Curator of the Friends Historical Library, oversees the operations of one of the most significant collections regarding the history of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the middle-Atlantic region, and American social reform movements. Landes is a lifelong student of Quaker history with an emphasis on trans-Atlantic Quaker community in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. As an information professional, she has convened peers to discuss collecting and managing radical materials. She has curated exhibits on antiwar movements and protest movements.

Carol Stakenas (Artistic Director/Curator)

Carol Stakenas is a curator, educator, and collaborator living in Somerville, MA. She has commissioned and produced multidisciplinary public art, site-responsive exhibitions, and creative initiatives in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, Bozeman, and beyond—all in service of strengthening the social fabric of communities through cross-sector alliances and socially engaged art. Previously, she launched a multi-year partnership between No Longer Empty and Kings County Hospital in Flatbush, Brooklyn to activate engagement at the intersection of art and wellness.

Zissel Aronow (Project Manager) | What Heals You?

Zissel Aronow is a queer community organizer and advocate based in Philly. Under the name House Cat, they curate radical and accessible spaces centered around care and resistance, such as Baby Tooth and the Feminist Flea Market & Craft Fair. Prior to project managing Rosine 2.0, Zi worked as a Crisis Advocate at Philadelphia’s rape crisis center, supporting victims/survivors of sexual violence through developing curriculum for and leading support groups, responding to hotline calls, and fostering sex worker advocacy efforts. Transformative justice, harm reduction and abolition thread through their work to collectively imagine a liberated world for us all.

Yema Rosado (Community Liaison) | What Heals You?

Yema Rosado is a Holistic Sex educator based in West Philly. Yema is a queer, trans, fat, Latinx, intersectional-feminist and abolitionist. Through their work as a sex educator, they offer consent-based, anti-oppressive, pleasure-centered, trauma-informed, and kink-competent workshops. They bring to Rosine 2.0 their abundant knowledge around community facilitation, consent education, LGBTQIA+ support, non-violent communication and healthy relationship building. They are in active support of the liberation and "access to thriving" for folks of marginalized identities and they are committed to promoting and embodying values such as accessibility, inclusivity, and compassion. Their work is delivered through the following political lenses: pro-sex work, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, abolitionist, intersectional-feminist, harm reduction, disability justice, and fat-liberation.

Sophia Becker (Rosine 2.0 Student Research Assistant)

Sophia Becker is a Philadelphia native and a student at Swarthmore College (class of 2024), majoring in Peace and Conflict Studies and Studio Art. She is a leader of War News Radio, a Swarthmore audio journalism group that covers underreported and human aspects of conflicts. She has done research on art and activism in the U.S. Pacific territories and held a community event to highlight the voices of poets and activists and their fight for self-determination. She has  also curated exhibitions with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Youth Council and hosted community events to engage Philadelphians with art.

Olivia Marotte (Rosine 2.0 Student Research Assistant)

Olivia Marotte is a native Arkansan and a student at Swarthmore College, where she pursues majors in Art History and Economics. Through her interdisciplinary studies, she endeavors to study public policy and money as it relates to art institutions and socially-engaged art. She serves as the Director of Finance and Communications for Swarthmore’s Kitao Gallery and promotes wellness by teaching group fitness classes at Swarthmore. In North Philadelphia, she has worked closely with Cesár Andreu Iglesias Garden to document its communal approaches to art, land activism, and cultural preservation, and helped promote its neighborhood composting initiative.