INTERNATIONAL WEEK 2013 | Keynote Speaker Toni Blackman

  

Monday May 15th
7:00 pm Baker Center Ballroom  

  • An award-winning artist, her steadfast work and commitment to hip-hop led the U.S. Department of State to select her to work as the first ever hip-hop artist to work as an American Cultural Specialist.
  • She has already served in Senegal, Ghana, Botswana, and Swaziland where her residencies include performance, workshops, and lectures on hip hop music and culture. She recently toured Southeast Asia with Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Musical Ambassador program
  • Toni has performed in Eve Ensler’s V-Day Festival, the DODGE Poetry Festival, in Spain at the Barcelona World Social Forum, featured in the CUTTING EDGE Festival in Darmstadt, Germany, featured at SENERAP International Hip Hop Festival in Dakar and toured South Africa as a headliner on the URBAN VOICES Festival alongside the legendary Linton Kwesi Johnson.
  • She has performed and spoken at the Aspen Institute Summit in Oman, at the prestigious Pio Manzu International Conference in Italy, during the World Cup at the ManUp Summit in South Africa, and for the FORD Foundation and City Xpo Big Ideas Conference in Virginia.
  • The founder and director of Freestyle Union, a cipher workshop that uses free styling as a tool to encourage social responsibility
  • Toni has done an extensive amount of work with the Girl Scouts of America and was instrumental in launching "The Girls Hip Hop Project" at the Center for Cultural Exchange in Portland, Maine (a program that provides workshops for teen girls from the Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and many other places).
  • "I Rhyme Like A Girl" project
    To provide training and support for emerging female hip-hop artists whose voices, activism and lyrics have been largely unnoticed. Provide artistic development and performance opportunities. Female artists acquire discipline, leadership training techniques that will empower young women to function as leaders within the hip-hop community and the world.

Sponsored by the Ki-Chul Andrew Jung International Week Endowment Fund, the Student Activities Commission (SAC), International Student Union (ISU), and International Student and Faculty Services (ISFS).

For questions and comments please contact Krista McCallum Beatty at 593-4330 or mccallum@ohio.edu