Cha Cha 2009 Artist Lineup

Hello my cha cha chicas!

We are excited to announce the amazing women and talented artists who will be a part of Cha Cha 2009.

Naila Keleta Mae

(Photo credit: Naila Keleta Mae & Charles Johnston)

Naila Keleta Mae is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and scholar who makes words come alive. Her work is charismatic, versatile and thoughtfully provocative and she has worked in Brazil, Canada, France, South Africa and the U.S.A. She has worked primarily in literature, theatre and music for more than two decades mainly as an accomplished spoken word artist, playwright, actor, singer-songwriter and recording artist and in June, she launched bloom, her third full-length album. Naila Keleta Mae is also on Faculty at Goddard College in the U.S. and a PhD Candidate at York University.

Over the years, Naila Keleta Mae has learned that occupying a visibly black, female, heterosexualized, middle-classed, multilingual, able body in contemporary Canada is profoundly informative and challenging. Within this context, interdisciplinary art, pedagogy and scholarship has emerged for her as an imaginative and radical mode of survival, expression and mobility in which institutionalized cultures of domination can be disrupted as new performances of the world are imagined and co-constituted. http://www.nailakeletamae.com/

Karleen Pendleton Jimenez

Karleen Pendleton Jiménez is a writer and assistant professor in theSchool of Education at Trent University. Her recent publications include the personal essay, "Little White Children: Notes from a Chicana Dyke Dad," and the co-edited collection (with Isabel Killoran) "Unleashing the unpopular": Talking about sexual orientation andgender diversity in education. Most recently she wrote the screenplayfor the award-winning animation short 'Tomboy,' based on her children's book "Are You a Boy or a Girl?". As she writes this, she is mostly creating a baby.

Victoria Mata & brescia birdthroat bloodbeard

Victoria Mata

Canadian born and Venezuelan raised, Victoria Mata is trained in African Dancing, Modern and Folkloric Dance. Victoria's dance career was firstinspired after a few workshops with Garth Fagan's Dance Company in RochesterNY, but most of her training is self taught and sporadic training wheneverpossible. Her strength is in her creativity and passion for corporalmovement. Her style is a fusion of modern dance, African, folkloric andfree styling. For the past five years she has focused on choreographies that interpret history and real-life situations. Her work has been shown inToronto's Ffida, International Dance Festival 2003, The International Youth Conference, Venezuela 2005 and a number cultural and peace festivals inToronto and New York. Victoria has been a member and performer of thestudent-run Only Human Dance Collective at the University of Toronto since2002 and has recently founded the MataDanZe Collective. Victoria hopes thather passion for communication through the art of corporal movement willinspire other dancers and non-dancers to use dance as a tool to overcomelife blockages and understand history.

brescia birdthroat bloodbeard

toronto-born artist and songbird.

if you have butterflies in your stomach

invite them into your heartif it gets caught in your throat

ask a bird to sing its song

if the bird forgets its tune

listen to a pebble instead

Dianah Smith

Dianah Smith is Jamaican-born, Ottawa-raised writer, teacher and arts educator. She has been published in Siren, Flirt, and Shameless magazines and the anthology, She’s Shameless: Women write about growing up, rocking out, and fighting back (Tightrope Books). Dianah is the recipient of several grants including an emerging writer’s grant from the Toronto Arts Council and a Writing Mentorship grant from the Ontario Arts Council (OAC) – she was mentored by Jamaican poet and short story writer, Olive Senior. Dianah teaches Autobiographical Writing courses for indigenous women, two-spirited folks, women of colour and trans folks of colour; and teaches creative writing workshops in schools through the OAC’s Artists in Education Program.
In 2006-2007, Dianah curated When the Rainbow Isn’t Enough a monthly reading series sponsored by the Toronto Women’s Bookstore featuring queer and trans emerging writers of colour and two-spirited emerging writers. In 2005, Dianah founded ‘A’ is for Orange a group for queer caribbean writers that aims to strengthen and build community by celebrating under-represented voices, sharing resources, and mentoring emerging writers. Dianah curates readings by ‘A’ is for Orange in partnership with various organizations in Toronto.

janet romero leiva

janet romero-leiva is a queer working class latina artist who travelled north through the america's at the age of 7 and has since been trying to figure out her place between south and north, between spanish and english, between borders and displacement - her work speaks to her experience of moving through multiple and often overlapping identities and the challenges encountered at various places throughtout time, she loves cart- wheeling and smoothies and can often be found reading children's books at the toronto women's bookstore

We look forward to seeing their work at this year's cha cha!