OPENING KEYNOTE
Jeff Chang
Social Historian, Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford University
Jeff Chang has written extensively on the intersection of race, art, and civil rights, and the socio-political forces that guided the hip-hop generation. As a speaker, he brings fresh energy and sweep to the essential American story, offering an invaluable interpretation at a time when race defines the national conversation. His latest book, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, questions why we keep talking about diversity even as American society is resegregating, both racially and economically.
Social Historian, Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford University
Jeff Chang has written extensively on the intersection of race, art, and civil rights, and the socio-political forces that guided the hip-hop generation. As a speaker, he brings fresh energy and sweep to the essential American story, offering an invaluable interpretation at a time when race defines the national conversation. His latest book, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, questions why we keep talking about diversity even as American society is resegregating, both racially and economically.
Daphne A. Brooks is Professor of African American Studies, Theater Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Duke University Press, 2006) and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (Continuum, 2005). She has published numerous articles on the intersectional politics of popular music culture. Brooks is currently working on a three-volume study of black women and popular music culture entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity. The first volume in the trilogy, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Archive, the Critic, and Black Feminist Musicking is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Brooks is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010) and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011). In 2017, Brooks served as the chief conference coordinator of the conference "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: Celebrating the Legacies of David Bowie and Prince" at Yale University.
Eric Mahmoud is founder and CEO of Seed Academy, Harvest Preparatory School, Best Academy, and Mastery School in Minneapolis. He has more than 20 years of hands-on experience in educational administration. Mr Mahmoud's commitment to academic excellence is reflected in his passionate pursuit of policies and programs that support teachers, empower parents, and inspire students. He believes, fundamentally, that all children deserve, and must receive, a high-quality education.
Featured speakers
Matt Fink, stage name Doctor Fink, helped define the history of popular music by playing keyboards in Prince’s legendary band The Revolution. Appearing on stage dressed in surgical scrubs and mask, he can be considered one of the most iconic keyboard players ever, having worked on and toured the albums Prince, Dirty Mind, Controversy, 1999, Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign O’ The Times, Lovesexy, Batman, and Graffiti Bridge. Songs he cowrote with Prince include “Dirty Mind”, “Computer Blue”, “17 Days”, “America”, and “It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night”. Doctor Fink further helped solidify the Minneapolis Sound by appearing on releases for Lipps Inc, The Time, Vanity 6, The Jets, and Madhouse. After working with Prince, Doctor Fink worked at Dominion Entertainment, a subsidiary of K-Tel Records, and produced musical content for video game, documentary film, and streaming services.
Shelby Johnson, or Shelby J as Prince dubbed her, is a native of Greensboro, North Carolina. Shelby has toured and recorded globally, with acts like Groove Theory, Mary J. Blige, Anthony Hamilton, D’Angelo and the Soultronics, Larry Graham, David Byrne, and for over a decade, with Prince. As member of the New Power Generation, Shelby performed with Prince at the now historic Super Bowl Halftime Show of 2007, as well as at the sold-out “The Earth: 21 Nights” concert series in London’s O2 Arena that same year. In 2012 Shelby and Prince co-wrote an ode to her home state entitled “North Carolina”. Performing is Shelby’s life mission, using her voice to encourage people to shine and reach their full God-given potential. For her music, see .
other speakers
Zaheer Ali is a historian and scholar of 20th century United States and African-American history. He has presented his scholarship on Prince at the EMP Pop Conference in 2012, Yale University’s “Black Star Rising & the Purple Reign” David Bowie-Prince Conference in January 2017, and the University of Salford’s “Purple Reign: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Life and Legacy of Prince" in May 2017. He is currently Oral Historian at Brooklyn Historical Society and a lecturer at New York University, where he taught “Prince: Sign of the Times,” one of the first college courses dedicated wholly to the study of Prince’s life and legacy in American history and culture. Follow Zaheer with @zaheerali.
Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University where he teaches black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005) and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014). Currently, he is working on two projects. The first, Feenin: R&B’s Technologies of Humanity, offers a critical history of the intimate relationship between R&B music and technology since the late 1970s. The second, Black Life/SchwarzSein, situates Blackness as an ungendered ontology of unbelonging.
LaMonda Horton-Stallings is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park. She is the author of Mutha is Half a Word!: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (2007) and Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (2015). She is also coeditor with Greg Thomas of Word Hustle: Critical Essays and Reflections on the Works of Donald Goines (2011).
Greg Tate is a writer, musician, and cultural provocateur who lives on Harlem’s Sugar Hill and whose books include Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (Duke University Press, 1992) and Everything But the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture (Broadway Books, 2004). His most recent publication is Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader (Duke University Press, 2016). Tate has also led the Conducted Improv big band Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber since 1999, and is a proud member of Howard University’s Bison Nation. He has formally taught at the universities of Yale, Columbia, and Brown, and Williams College. His most recent Visiting Faculty appointments were at Princeton University, where he taught ‘The Loud Black and Proud Musicology of Amiri Baraka’, and New York University, where he debuted ‘A Brief History of Woke Black Music'.
Alisha Lola Jones is an assistant professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Dr Jones is a graduate of University of Chicago (PhD), Yale Divinity School (MDiv), Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM),
and Oberlin Conservatory (BM). She is a council member of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the SEM liaison to the American Academy of Religion. Additionally, as a performer-scholar, she acts as consultant for seminaries and arts organizations about curriculum, programming, and content development. Her forthcoming book Flaming: The Peculiar Theo-Politics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance breaks ground by analyzing the role of gospel music making in constructing and renegotiating gender identity among black men. Dr Jones' research interests include musical masculinities, gastromusicology, future studies, ecomusicology, music and theology, the music industry, musics of the African diaspora and emerging research on music and future foodways in conjunction with The Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley, CA.
Andrea Swensson is an author, radio host, and music journalist. She hosts a weekly program about the Minnesota music scene, The Local Show, at Minnesota Public Radio’s 89.3 The Current and has contributed music journalism to NPR Music, City Pages, Mpls/St. Paul Magazine, and Paisley Park, where she has written several tour guide books for Prince's museum. Her first book, Got to Be Something Here: The Rise of the Minneapolis Sound, traces the rise of that distinctive sound through two generations of political upheaval, rebellion, and artistic passion. It was released in October 2017 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Stijn Vandeputte, known simply as STIJN, is an actor, voice-over artist, creative mind, but above all a musician from Brussels. He released four full-length albums: N°000 (Mijn Label 2001), Euphoric (EMI music/Mijn Label 2004), The World Is Happy Now (EMI music/Mijn Label 2006) and Ten Danz (Pias/Mijn Label 2010). STIJN's music is a mixture of funk, electro, new wave, house, and hiphop. Influenced by Prince in many ways and having attended over 60 concerts, both front and backstage, STIJN is known in Belgium as a Prince connoisseur and his live tributes to the Minneapolis Sound. As solo artist he inherited the DIY mentality from punk rock, and loves to involve his audience with high-energy performances. His live shows brought him all over Europe, as well as Japan, South Africa, and the United States.
Stephen McClellan (music promoter and manager)
Stephen McClellan was instrumental in transforming The Depot/Sam’s into the legendary First Avenue night club in Minneapolis. He is an educator and promoter of rock music who has worked with KFAI radio, the Cedar Cultural Center, and the Downtown Warehouse Association, and he has taught at McNally Smith College of Music in Saint Paul. Starting out as bartender, Steve supported the Twin Cities multi-genre music scene for 30 years as talent buyer and general manager. He works with street-level bands through DEMO, The Schooner Tavern, and Hi Fi Records, where he hosts in-store performances and promotes talented local musicians and songwriters undiscovered by mainstream audiences such as Ross William Perry, Jack Knife and the Sharps, and the Middle States. Steve is involved in the Museum of Minnesota Music and is serving on the City of Minneapolis steering committee for a Minnesota Historical Society project on our local music scenes. He is the proud father of three grown children, all artists.
Stephen McClellan (music promoter and manager)
Stephen McClellan was instrumental in transforming The Depot/Sam’s into the legendary First Avenue night club in Minneapolis. He is an educator and promoter of rock music who has worked with KFAI radio, the Cedar Cultural Center, and the Downtown Warehouse Association, and he has taught at McNally Smith College of Music in Saint Paul. Starting out as bartender, Steve supported the Twin Cities multi-genre music scene for 30 years as talent buyer and general manager. He works with street-level bands through DEMO, The Schooner Tavern, and Hi Fi Records, where he hosts in-store performances and promotes talented local musicians and songwriters undiscovered by mainstream audiences such as Ross William Perry, Jack Knife and the Sharps, and the Middle States. Steve is involved in the Museum of Minnesota Music and is serving on the City of Minneapolis steering committee for a Minnesota Historical Society project on our local music scenes. He is the proud father of three grown children, all artists.
Andrea Jenkins is a writer, performance artist, poet, and transgender activist. She is the first African American openly trans woman to be elected to office in the United States. Andrea has experience working in community development in North Minneapolis, and in delivering social services in South Minneapolis. She moved to Minnesota to attend the University of Minnesota in 1979 and was hired by the Hennepin County government, where she worked for a decade. Andrea worked as a staff member on the Minneapolis City Council for 12 years before beginning work as curator of the Transgender Oral History Project at the U of M's Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies. Andrea holds a Masters Degree in Community Development from Southern New Hampshire University, a MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University and a Bachelors Degree in Human Services from Metropolitan State University. She is a nationally and internationally recognized writer and artist, a 2011 Bush Fellow to advance the work of transgender inclusion, and the recipient of numerous other awards and fellowships.
Rashad Shabazz (Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University)
Professor Rashad Shabazz's academic expertise brings together human geography, Black cultural studies, gender studies, and critical prison studies. His research explores how race, sexuality, and gender are informed by geography. His most recent work Spatializing Blackness (University of Illinois Press, 2015) examines how carceral power within the geographies of Black Chicagoans shaped urban planning, housing policy, policing practices, gang formation, high incarceration rates, masculinity and health. Shabazz's scholarship has appeared in Souls, The Spatial-Justice Journal, ACME, Gender, Place and Culture, and Occasions, and he has also published several book chapters and book reviews. He is currently working on two projects: the first examines how Black people use public spaces to negotiate and perform race, gender, and sexual identity, as well as to express political or cultural identity. The second project uncovers the role Black musicians in Minneapolis played in giving rise to "the Minneapolis sound".
Professor Rashad Shabazz's academic expertise brings together human geography, Black cultural studies, gender studies, and critical prison studies. His research explores how race, sexuality, and gender are informed by geography. His most recent work Spatializing Blackness (University of Illinois Press, 2015) examines how carceral power within the geographies of Black Chicagoans shaped urban planning, housing policy, policing practices, gang formation, high incarceration rates, masculinity and health. Shabazz's scholarship has appeared in Souls, The Spatial-Justice Journal, ACME, Gender, Place and Culture, and Occasions, and he has also published several book chapters and book reviews. He is currently working on two projects: the first examines how Black people use public spaces to negotiate and perform race, gender, and sexual identity, as well as to express political or cultural identity. The second project uncovers the role Black musicians in Minneapolis played in giving rise to "the Minneapolis sound".
Teresa Gowan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her fields of expertise include urban sociology, ethnography, poverty and marginality, consumption and branded labor, and the cultural micro-foundations of alternative economies. Her book Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) analyzes the medicalization and criminalization of homelessness. Her largest ongoing research project in Minnesota examines the important place of addiction treatment within contemporary social policy, studying the primary forms of addiction intervention targeted to the uninsured with a combination of ethnography, life-history interviews of clients (inside and after program experience), and discourse analysis of program material. She plays the fiddle.
Kirsten Delegard is the project director of the Mapping Prejudice Project and the Historyapolis Project, which seek to bring new attention to the often troubled past of her hometown, Minneapolis. She works at the Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota and has faculty affiliation with the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society. Delegard is the author of Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) and was also the coeditor, with Nancy A. Hewitt, for the two-volume textbook Women, Families, and Communities: Readings in American History. Delegard was the visual editor and essayist for North Country: The Making of Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and recently authored "Prince and the Making of the Minneapolis Mystique," with Michael J. Lansing for the Middle West Review, amongst other writings.
Gilbert B. Rodman is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. His major research interests include popular culture, communication technologies, intellectual property, and the politics of race and ethnicity. He is the author of Why Cultural Studies? (Wiley Blackwell, 2015) and Elvis After Elvis (Routledge, 1996), the editor of The Race and Media Reader (Routledge, 2014), and coeditor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). He is currently working on a book entitled Creating While Black: A Racial History of Copyright in the US.
Andrew Flory is assistant professor of music at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. He teaches courses in American music, focusing on rock, rhythm and blues, and jazz. Andrew has written extensively about American R&B, and is an expert on the music of Motown. His book, I Hear a Symphony: Listening to the Music of Motown, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. Working directly with Universal Records, Andrew has served as consultant for several recent Motown reissues, including the recent 40th Anniversary Edition of Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man. Andrew is also coauthor of the history of rock textbook What’s that Sound (W.W. Norton).
Nekima Levy-Pounds is a civil rights attorney, national expert on racial justice, former law professor, activist, and legal scholar. She previously served as a Professor of Law at the University of St Thomas Law School for thirteen years, where she founded and directed the Community Justice Project, an award-winning civil rights legal clinic. Nekima’s work has been featured in Associated Press, Crisis Magazine, MIC.com, Huffington Post, MinnPost, and the Star Tribune, to name a few. She has appeared on national news outlets such as CNN, PBS, Democracy Now, Al Jazeera America, News One, and HuffPost Live. Nekima is owner and principal consultant of Black Pearl, LLC, a multi-faceted company that provides business consulting, talent management, and media management services. In 2016, she received the Distinguished Service Award from the Governor’s Commission on Martin Luther King Day. In 2014, she was named a “Minnesota Attorney of the Year” by Minnesota Lawyer and recognized as one of “50 Under 50 Most Influential Law Professors of Color in the Country” by Lawyers of Color Magazine. She previously served as president of the Minneapolis NAACP and as an advisor to Black Lives Matter Minneapolis. She ran for Mayor of Minneapolis in 2017.
Community session "Prince and the sweetness of black:
the minneapolis Queer Aesthetic"
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the critically acclaimed author of M Archive: After the End of the World and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (shortlisted for a LAMBDA Literary Award), and she is the coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. With her partner Sangodare (Julia Roxanne Wallace) she is the cofounder of the Mobile Homecoming project, an experiential archive amplifying generations of Black LGBTQ Brilliance. Alexis was also the first researcher to work in the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College and the June Jordan papers at Harvard University. She uses archival research to create interactive educational ceremonies through her multimedia community school Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind. Alexis is currently the visiting Winton Chair in Women and Gender Studies at University of Minnesota, and is dramaturg for the world premiere of Sharon Bridgforth's play Dat Black Mermaid Man Lady directed by Ebony Noelle Golden at Pillsbury House this summer.
Junauda Petrus is a creative activist, writer, playwright, screenwriter, and multidimensional performance artist who is Minneapolis-born, West-Indian descended, and African-sourced. She is the cofounder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, an experimental arts production company. She is currently writing and directing, "Sweetness of Wild" a web series themed around Blackness, queerness, biking, resistance, love, and coming of age in Minneapolis. Her work centers around wildness, Afrofuturism, ancestral healing, sweetness, spectacle, and shimmer. Her first YA novel, Mable & Audre’s Journey Through Black Universe debuts in 2019 with Dutton Children’s Books.
Tish Jones is a poet, performer, educator, and organizer from Saint Paul and founder and director of TruArtSpeaks. She has performed at CBGC, the Kaplan Theater, the Walker Art Center, Intermedia Arts, the Cedar Cultural Center, and more. Her work can be found in the Minnesota Humanities Center’s anthology entitled Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota, the 2011 and 2013 Saint Paul Almanac, and the Loft Literary Center’s Nation of Immigrants audio CD. Currently a fellow in the inaugural Intercultural Leadership Institute, Jones has a passion for bridging arts & culture, civic engagement, and youth development. Her work for the Youth Speaks program explores the ways in which art can function as a tool for social transformation, liberation, and education. When you think of Tish Jones, know that she is somewhere dismantling age-old systems of oppression, putting on for Hip Hop culture, and creating new art to move the conversations forward.
Danez Smith is a Black, Queer, Poz writer and performer from St Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), finalist for the 2017 National Book Award, and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez's work has been featured widely including on Buzzfeed, the New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness. Danez’s third collection, Homie, will be published by Graywolf in Spring 2020. Find more at www.danezsmithpoet.com
Erin Sharkey is a writer, producer, educator, and graphic designer based in Minneapolis. She is the cofounder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts production company called Free Black Dirt. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Walker Untitled, Brooklyn Quarterly, and Paper Darts. Erin was a 2016-17 Loft Mentor Series winner in creative nonfiction, 2017 and 2016 VONA/Voices Writing fellow, 2015 Givens fellow, and a Coffee House Press in the Stacks artist-in-residence at the Archie Givens Sr Archive at the University of Minnesota. In 2018, Erin will be studying soil and the stars as an artist-in-residence at the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota, and traveling to Buffalo, NY, to study black migration and urban farming on a 2018 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. She also is producer for the episodic web film project "Sweetness of Wild", teaches at the Loft Literary Center, and is an educator with the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.
Jayanthi Kyle is a gospel and soul singer. Born to an Indian father and a Native American and black mother, Jayanthi grew up in Chicago's South Side and Maple Grove, MN. She started singing with her sister in Baptist churches at the age of four. She formed the band Black Audience to open for Jim Ruiz at PalmFest. The group plays old gospel, country, blues, traditional Irish reels, and covers of songs by Bob Dylan and Harry Belafonte. Jayanthi also sings for Jayanthi and the Crybabies and the indie R&B group Gospel Machine, whose song "Hand in Hand" was inspired by the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and became an unofficial anthem for the Black Lives Matter movement in Minneapolis.
Sangodare creates media and art for healing and transformation. Sangodare is an artist, filmmaker and preacher. As artist in residence at the University of Minnesota and visiting faculty in Film Studies at Lawrence University, Sangodare facilitates interactive spaces for transformation and transcendence. Sangodare’s work builds on familial legacies from three generations of Black Baptist preachers and church workers serving communities in the South. Along with primary collaborator, Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sangodare co-created Mobile Homecoming and Black Feminist Film School. Mobile Homecoming is a national intergenerational experiential archive project that amplifies generations of Black LGBTQ brilliance.
PLENARY PANEL "prINCE Alumni "
Mayte Garcia is a dancer, choreographer, actress, singer, model, and author, whose success derives from a work ethic going back to her childhood. Born in Alabama to parents of Puerto Rican descent, Mayte grew up between the United States, Germany, and Puerto Rico. She began classical ballet at the age of three, and at eight became the world’s youngest professional belly dancer following in her mother’s footsteps, as featured on the popular TV show “That’s Incredible”. At a Prince show in Germany her parents noticed “Thunder” (which opens Diamonds and Pearls) had an Arabic vibe to it, and urged Mayte to send a video cassette to show him her belly-dancing talents. He was impressed, invited her backstage, and they kept in touch. When Mayte turned 18 he invited her to join the New Power Generation. She collaborated as dancer and director in many music videos, tours, award shows, and television shows in the mid-1990s, and recorded her own album Child of the Sun, produced by Prince. Mayte directed the “Around the World in A Day” tour with the NPG dance company and choreographed Britney Spears belly-dancing moves in “I’m A Slave 4U”. As actress Mayte has appeared in Hollywood cinema (Firehouse Dog), independent films, and various TV series. In 2017 she published The Most Beautiful Girl: My Life With Prince.
Harlan Austin is president of Bodyguard Careers in Minneapolis. He has acquired over 25 years of field experience as an executive protection specialist, seven years of which he served as director of Security Services at Paisley Park. Foremost in his duties at Paisley Park was assuring the safety and welfare of Prince and the celebrities with whom he collaborated or associated, like Lenny Kravitz, Madonna, Carmen Elektra, Sheena Easton, Patti LaBelle, and Kim Basinger.
Scottie Baldwin is a sound engineer and audio consultant who worked as engineer and drum technician for Prince from 1990 to 1994. He left the educational environs of Paisley Park to embark on a career as a front-of-house engineer. Over the years Scottie has worked with Lady Gaga, Madonna, the Black Eyed Peas, Duran Duran, Stevie Wonder, R. Kelly, Earth, Wind and Fire, and countless other world-class acts. Having left a distinct impression on Prince, he found himself called back in 2000 to provide his engineering expertise on several international tours, culminating with the “Piano and a Microphone Tour” in 2016.
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Kim Berry is a cosmetologist based in Los Angeles. After her formal education at Pacific Beauty College, the universe aligned her life to cross paths with Prince, starting a whirlwind education over 28 years. She is responsible for many iconic Prince looks in photos, music videos, and concerts, including two of his most famous live performances, the concert before his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2007. Under the watchful eye of Prince, Kim opened her First Lady Elite Salon and Spa in L.A. Kim’s facilities serve many women of Hollywood, but she is also known for organizing community awareness events around HIV and mammogram testing, for feeding and clothing the homeless, and for fabulous welfare-to-work makeovers aiming to motivate young women to take full control of their lives and be their best selves.
Dave Hampton has been in the recording industry for over 40 years, and was technical director at Paisley Park. He began his career at Oberheim Electronics under the watchful eye of Tom Oberheim himself. The designer behind the acclaimed Reftone speakers, Dave consults with manufacturers on new technology, writes books on audio engineering, lectures on the industry, and continues to design creative spaces for top artists. Apart from Prince, Dave has worked with artists as diverse as Herbie Hancock, Lady Gaga, and Justin Timberlake, and he is technical director for the Miles Davis estate. Dave’s company MATK Corp is called on to create and provide custom solutions in audio engineering. He is on the advisory board of the Production and Engineers Wing of the Grammy Awards.
Stacia Lang is a costume designer. After graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City she worked at the New York Ballet and for Broadway musicals. In the early 1990s she returned to her native Minnesota to spend three years designing costumes for Prince and his band and protégés. She has also worked with Billy Idol and Dolly Parton. In 1997 Stacia embarked on an 18-year film career in Hollywood. Her superhero and space suits appear in blockbuster movies such as Interstellar, Star Trek, The Amazing Spider-man, The Cell, Tron: Legacy, Man of Steel, and Burlesque. A comprehensive list of her films can be found on her IMDB page.
Craig Laurence Rice is an entertainment executive, entrepreneur, and award-winning producer and director, and taught at McNally Smith College of Music. His credits include being producer for the 30th anniversary show for “A Prairie Home Companion” on PBS, executive producer on the nationally syndicated series “Million Dollar Idea,” and executive producer and director for the feature length documentary Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks for HBO, which was nominated for three Emmy Awards and a NAACP Image Award. Craig also has an outstanding career in the music industry, serving as director of Paisley Park and executive with MCA records. He has been artist manager and road and tour manager for domestic and international musical tours for many recording artists, including Prince.
Sotera Tschetter is a designer and was Prince’s creative director from 1989 to 1992. From a humble upbringing in the Dakota plains, Sotera earned her degree in design from the University of Minnesota. She returned to the Twin Cities from the West Coast to work on Prince’s movie Graffiti Bridge. He took notice of her work ethic and asked her to help with the Glam Slam club he was building in downtown Minneapolis, creating a “creative director” position just for her, for all things visual. Sotera’s direction duties included art design, photo shoots, sets for music videos and tours, album covers, music instruments (including the gun microphone), furniture, and Paisley Park itself. Her work can be seen in the music videos of international hits like “Get Off”, “7”, “Sexy M.F.”, “Money Don’t Matter 2nite”, and many more. Her milestone project came when Prince asked her to create a new symbol that would come to represent his new name, the extensive research for which was done largely at the U of M libraries. Today Sotera lives and works in Twin Cities, designing and inventing products for some of America’s largest retailers.
Special performance
Nadja Joy Mott, artist name Bon Mott, is a performance and video artist from Melbourne, and PhD student at Victoria College of the Arts. She writes: "The Symposium is in line with my research within fundamental questions about our current society and our reimagining social change. I create my visual art through intersecting non-binary themes of Energy, Lightning and Plasma. As an Interdisciplinary artist. My artwork is in private collections, and I exhibit my artwork internationally. Over the last year, I exhibited at the Venice's Biennale, Italy, Devt9 Festival in Belgrade, Serbia, Saint Remy's ArtApart Festival in France, and Hobart's MONA. My first solo sculpture show at Gertrude Contemporary was followed by a Masters in Sculpture, at VCA, and two solo sculpture shows at Smyrnios Gallery, Prahran. A Masters of Design enriched my sculptural practice and expanded on my philosophies on non-binary themes and questioning our current societal views through working with the mediums of performance art, vocals, film, photography, and industrial design. I am president of the inclusive Well-being Arts Graduate Group Program, providing the University of Melbourne Parkville and Southbank students access to curate courageous work." See www.bonmott.com.