9:00 a.m. (AZ Time)
Sedona Arts Center
15 Art Barn Road
Sedona, AZ 86336
Race, Arts and Democracy
About
Vision & Sound creates an educational experience and environment that broadens the understanding and appreciation of African American art, music, film, and literary works for multigenerational and multicultural audiences. Vision and Sound builds supportive relationships to encourage cultural equity throughout Arizona and beyond – recognizing that professional American artists of African descent are too often overlooked.
VISION & SOUND SYMPOSIUM 2025
Art & Nation Symposium
Keynote Speaker
Keynote Speaker: LaTasha Barnes
Multi-Bessie award winner (2021/2023), and New York Times celebrated Best Dance & Breakout Star (2021) LaTasha Barnes is an internationally awarded and critically-acclaimed dance artist, choreographer, scholar, and tradition-bearer of Black American Social Dance co-based in Phoenix, AZ and New York. A Richmond, VA native, she is globally celebrated for her musicality, athleticism, and joyful presence throughout the cultural traditions she bears: House Dance, Hip-Hop, Waacking, Authentic Jazz, and Lindy Hop, among them. Barnes’ expansive artistic, competitive, and performative skills have made her a frequent collaborator to The Kennedy Center for The Performing Arts, Summer Dance Forever & Foundation Hip-Hop Center Amsterdam, Singapore-based Timbre Arts Group, Ephrat Asherie Dance, and many more.
Barnes’ leadership and business acumen have placed her in positions of service as Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees for Ladies of Hip-Hop Festival®, Vice President of Marketing & Outreach for the International Lindy Hop Championship®, Directing Board Member of the Black Lindy Hoppers Fund, the Frankie Manning Foundation, and a contributing member to the NEFER Global Movement Collective.
Expanding the scope of impact for the communities she serves, Barnes completed her self-designed Masters in Ethnochoreology, Black Studies and Performance Studies thru New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study (2019). Her thesis and continued applied research are working to bridge the gap between communities of practice and academic cultural dance research, performance, preservation and pedagogy as well as expand the reach of dance as a healing tool for disabled US military veterans like herself.
In support of this dialogue, Barnes was honored to be a contributing author to the 2022 National Dance Education Organization Ruth Lovell Murray Book Award winning text Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century - Univ. FL Press (2021). Ensuring future artists and dance scholars maintain authentic cultural context as they move through the world bearing forth Black dance traditions. To further support this effort Barnes joined the esteemed faculty of Arizona State University School of Music, Dance & Theater in Fall 2021. Now Associate Prof. of Dance, Barnes is the second tenured Hip-Hop Dance professor in the US, proudly representing the class of academic educators who actively contribute to the cultures studied.
From the analysis of her research and in deeper concert with the mission to strengthen Black artists reverence for and expression with Jazz, Barnes is honored to be the visionary creator and Artistic Director of the multi-award winning and NYT critically acclaimed intergenerational and intercommunal cultural arts project The Jazz Continuum. First commissioned by Guggenheim Works & Process, further supported by The Joyce Theater (2022) TJC is a recipient of the prestigious NEFA National Dance Project grant (2022), and two Bessie Awards for Outstanding Creation/Choreography & Outstanding Music Direction.
Additionally she is also honored to be a part of the Brain Trust that developed the ground-breaking stage production Sw!ng Out, bringing the passion and power of Lindy Hop and its community to the concert stage. The New York Times said of her collaboration with Caleb Teicher in Swing Out,“Barnes is especially extraordinary for the way the past and the present can pass through her...”
Across all her endeavors, Barnes' eternal purpose is to inspire fellow artists and arts enthusiasts to champion artivism in their creative expressions and daily lives.
Presenters
Liz Lerman
Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, and speaker. She has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and experiences that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and experiences that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance until 2011, when she handed the artistic leadership of the company over to the next generation of Dance Exchange artists.
Lerman is regularly invited as a keynote speaker to diverse gatherings – from arts presenters to ceramicists, research universities to arts-military convenings. Lerman’s collection of essays,Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, was published in 2011 and released in paperback in 2014. Critique is Creative, a collection of essays from Critical Response practitioners from around the world, was published in 2022 by Wesleyan University Press.
Sumana Mandala
Sumana Sen Mandala is a Bharata-Nrityam artist. She teaches in studio and higher education settings and practices in non-traditional spaces. She focuses on rasa or deep engagement to center collective knowledge, the value of every voice, and responsibility and response in any space she enters. Sumana is interested in engaging anyone who wants to move in a process integrating dance-movement into contemporary lived experiences.
Her ongoing project Look into my Voice, Hear my Dance facilitates survivors of sexual/ domestic violence telling their stories in collaboration with practitioners of Indian dance. Sumana is a Race, Arts & Democracy Fellow at Arizona State University, has published articles on critical pedagogy and belonging and presented her work at several conferences.
Mandala was recognized as 2024 Arizona Dance Educator of the Year by the AZDEO, is Co-director of the Critical Response Process (CRP) Certification Program, and is the Director of Dansense-Nrtyabodha.
Moderator
Dr. Lois Brown
As director of the ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, Lois Brown oversees the only entity at ASU and in the state of Arizona that positions race and democracy in direct relation with each other. The Center, which is based in the Office of the University Provost, advances and creates initiatives that intensify the intellectual, pedagogical and programmatic efforts of the university. Brown, who also is ASU Foundation Professor of English, is committed to programming, partnerships and outreach that enable the center to focus on race and democracy in the context of education, social justice, public history, poverty and economic opportunity, the arts, law, government, the sciences and the environment. Brown's public speaking and presentations on equity, leadership, justice and inclusion complement the Center's efforts to support and achieve positive systemic change and justice.
Julie A. Richard
Vision and Sound 2024 is presented by the Sedona Arts Center in partnership with the ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and is supported by generous grants and sponsorships. Chief Executive Office Julie Richard oversees the organization that became the Sedona Arts Center in 1961 after an official renaming. 1994 was the year of expansion with the addition of a new building to house an art gallery, classroom space, and the community theatre, which was founded in 1970. In 2001 the mission was redefined to focus primarily on education through the School of the Arts and gallery exhibitions of the visual arts. The School of the Arts has become a catalyst for creative development for students of all ages, from the very young through the golden years of life.
Today the Sedona Arts Center is a rich legacy of the founders’ vision. As one of Northern Arizona’s oldest 501(c) 3 nonprofit organizations it continues to be a gathering place where artists and those who love art can explore, teach and exhibit. The Arts Center has grown into an educational institution dedicated to nurturing creative discovery, learning and sharing through arts education and artistic development with an international presence.
2025 Artist
Amber Doe is a research based, intersectional artist working in textile, sculpture, installation, sound, photography and video. Growing up on the rural Drowning Creek Native American Reservation, she vividly understood the complexities of discrimination. Doe creates generative, immersive works with urgency based on American state sanctioned violence. Doe creates work with a historical and contemporary understanding of American and post colonial western societies’ desire to control and subdue black bodies along with a vivid material portrait of her immediate family, diasporic and interspecies family.
Lived experiences as a black American woman are Doe’s chief contextual frameworks including black femininity, post colonial trauma, autobiographical, ancestral and multigenerational cultural practices and the natural environment. Natural materials and animal sounds used for her sculptures, installations and performances make reference to her lived experience on the reservation and now in the American Southwest: palm leaves, branches, flowers, hair extensions and cotton rope are personal and ancestral.
Doe’s work has been exhibited at the Amarillo Museum of Art, Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Museum of Museums, the LeRoy Neiman Art Center, and a solo exhibition at Snakebite Gallery, in Tucson, AZ. Doe was awarded the 2022/2023 Projecting All Voices Fellowship through Arizona State University and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. In 2021, Doe was an Abbey Awards Fellow in Painting at the British School at Rome and has been awarded residencies at Arteles in Haukijärvi, Finland, Can Serrat in Barcelona, Spain and La Ira de Dios in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Shown in galleries including Untitled, NY, Irwin Gallery, Detroit, MI, MCLA Gallery, North Adams, MA, and Exo Den Haag, The Hague, NL and a solo exhibition at Snakebite Gallery, Tucson, AZ. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Anjola Ayodele is a Nigerian-American mural & digital artist based in Phoenix, Arizona. She founded Jola Studios, where her aim is to tell stories of communities through murals, public art, branding, and interior design. Anjola helps transform spaces and connect communities by storytelling through vibrant, diverse mural and digital art that celebrates representation. Her collaborative approach lends itself to creating pieces that are inclusive and informed by stories. When she’s not drawing, she writes poetry, drums and enjoys eating fried plantains.
