AISHA FUKUSHIMA is a Performance Lecturer, Justice Strategist, Singer/Songwriter, and RAPtivist (rap activist). Fukushima founded RAPtivism (Rap Activism), a hip hop project spanning 20 countries and four continents, amplifying universal efforts for freedom and justice. She is a multilingual, multiracial African American Japanese woman who has done lectures and performances everywhere from the United States to France, Morocco, Japan, Germany, England, South Africa, Senegal, India, Denmark and beyond. Fukushima’s ‘RAPtivism’ work has been featured on Oprah Magazine, TEDx, KQED Public Television, The Seattle Times, TV 2M Morocco, The Bangalore Mirror, HYPE, South Africa’s #1 Hip Hop Magazine, and Tour highlights include performing for audiences of over 20,000 people in Nepal, speaking with the President of Estonia about the power of music to create change, and sharing stages with the likes of Bernie Sanders, Emory Douglas (Black Panthers), KRS-One, Herbie Hancock, Christian McBride, The Isley Brothers, and M1 (Dead Prez). As a public speaker, Aisha combines the art of performance and lecture. In my keynotes she links themes such as hip hop, global citizenship, empowerment, feminism and cultural activism through storytelling as well as live musical performance.

As a public speaker, Fukushima combines the art of performance and lecture. In her speeches she links themes such as hip hop, global citizenship, empowerment, feminism and cultural activism with live musical performance. She was the first non-Native person to deliver a keynote address at Montana’s 2012 Schools of Promise Conference for Indigenous youth and has presented at such diverse venues as Stanford University, Yale Law School, Duke University, the National Conference On Race and Ethnicity (NCORE), People of Color in Independent Schools (POCIS) conferences, UMass Amherst, TEDxSitka, TEDxBend, TEDxWhitman, TEDxUWCCR, Rock The School Bells, Osaka University, among others.

Martronimous is a West Philadelphia-based trumpet player, producer, and multidisciplinary artist mixing jazz, hip-hop, and electronic music; beats and horns made for chasing dreams, healing, and getting free. Their work explores identity, especially queerness and gender, using art as a transformative tool as well as a means to build connection and community power.

Singer, songwriter, activist Nobuko Miyamoto uses song, dance and theater to explore ways to reclaim and decolonize our minds, bodies, histories, and communities, seeing the arts as a means of social change and solidarity across cultural borders.

Originally trained as a dancer performing on Broadway and in films, she found her own voice as an activist and singer in the Asian American Movement leading to the co-creation of the iconic album A Grain of Sand (1973, Paredon/Smithsonian Folkways). She went on to establish arts organization Great Leap, creating musicals, concerts, albums, music videos and most recently FandangObon, a festival of art, cultures, earth.

Nobuko’s Smithsonian Folkways album 120,000 Stories, the number of Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII, explores her identity as a Japanese American woman, a life that intertwines the Asian and Black experience, and her concerns about Climate Change. In June 2021, her memoir, Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love and Revolution will be published by University of California Press.