Mixed Race Seattle Conference: March 28, 2020

Nikkita Oliver is a Seattle-based creative, community organizer, abolitionist, educator, and attorney. Working at the intersections of arts, law, education, and community organizing she strives to create experiences which draw us closer to our humanity and invites us to imagine what we hope to see in the future. 

She has opened for Cornel West and Chuck D of Public Enemy, featured on the Breakfast Club, KUOW’s The Week in Review, Cut Stories, and performed on The Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert. Her writing has been published in the South Seattle Emerald, Crosscut,the Establishment, Last Real Indians, The Seattle Weekly, and The Stranger. She organizes with No New Youth Jail and the Seattle Peoples Party. 

Nikkita is the co-executive director of Creative Justice, an arts-based alternative to incarceration and a healing engaged youth-led community-based program. She was the first political candidate of the Seattle Peoples Party running for Mayor of Seattle in 2017 narrowly missing the general election by approximately 1,100 votes; coming in third of 21 candidates.

Alissa Paris (She/Her/Hers) is a queer, Black, multiracial, cisgender woman who calls Minneapolis home. In 2014 Paris co-founded MidWest Mixed, an all-volunteer Minnesota-based organization dedicated to shining light on the diverse experiences of multiracial and mixed race people and families through monthly courageous conversations, a biennial conference, and arts-based community activation spaces. She currently serves as MidWest Mixed’s Executive Director. Paris also currently works as Program Coordinator for the African American Leadership Forum, where she’s part of a dynamic team producing leadership development experiences and more for Black Minnesotans. She has worked as a Teaching Artist leading and co-directing dance workshops for over a decade, and she develops and facilitates interactive workshops on mixedness for racial justice days at local high schools.

Audrey Remle is a mixed Native American (Hunkpapa Lakota), Japanese American, and African American woman local to the South Seattle area. She has served on the Seattle JACL board since 2016 and currently works as a Professional Mentor for Friends of the Children Seattle, a non-profit organization providing long term mentors to children who need extra support in their lives.

Sharon H. Chang is an award-winning writer, photographer, activist, and educator. She is the author of two books, Raising Mixed Race and Hapa Tales and Other Lies. Her writing has also appeared in BuzzFeed, ThinkProgress, Racism Review, Hyphen Magazine, ParentMap Magazine, South Seattle Emerald, The Seattle Globalist, AAPI Voices and the International Examiner. Sharon won first place in small format editorial & commentary at the 2015 Society of Professional Journalists: Excellence in Journalism awards. She was named 2015 Social Justice Commentator of the Year by The Seattle Globalist and 2016 Favorite Local API Author / Writer by International Examiner readers.

As a photographer, Sharon is a social justice and visual storyteller whose work centers BIPOC, especially womxn and femmes, gender diverse peoples, youth, and family. She has shot many rallies, marches, protests, grassroots orgs, and nonprofits in the Pacific Northwest. Her current long-term project is a series portraying Womxn and Nonbinary Farmers of Color in Washington State, launched by the 2019 Northwest Journalists of Color Visual Storytelling Grant, for which Sharon was the inaugural winner.

Gabriel de los Angeles will lead a workshop called Non-White Mixed PoC: Sovereignty, Nationality, Ethnicity, Race, Colorism (SNERC). The son of Chief Andy de los Angeles of the Snoqualmie nation and a Filipina immigrant, Gabriel will utilize his Indigenous educational and equity frameworks, community leadership experience, and personal stories to help establish a common language and direction for reflection that we can use to dive deeper into our lives, families, and communities.

DeAnn Alcantara-Thompson is a mixed race parent, partner, friend and community member. She is Filipina, Chamorro and has  European heritage. She has spent most of her paid her career as an advocate for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, a community orgranizer and an educator at the intersection of building the relationships/the world that we want with the skills and tools that we are learning, creating and revitalizing. She is excited to be in conversation together in envisioning a truly just future! She believes that liberation will win and that justice is worth fighting for.

Leanna Keith is a freelance flutist, improviser and composer. She is co-founder of the 501(c)(3) arts organization Kin of the Moon and co-artistic director and flutist of the ensemble. Kin of the Moon is an improvisation-centric, technology-friendly chamber music ensemble. Leanna is dedicated to playing music by composers who are still living, and advocates for the usage of music as social activism. Her recent work “Finding the InBetween” focuses on the challenges faced by mixed-race people in America. Her incubating projects focus on themes such as gun violence and queer identity. Leanna is the professor of flute at Cornish College of the Arts.

Co-founder of University of Washington’s Mixed Student Union, Nikki Torres is a senior at UW studying Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Global Health. Her interests lie in health equity and diversity. She plans on applying her education and passions to a career in medicine and advocacy in the future. Ms.Torres and four other UW students started the Mixed Student Union this last fall, their mission being to provide a community for multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural students and their allies in addition to supporting students in their exploration of personal identity. Ms.Torres and her peers felt that there not only needed to be a space for students to find a community but a space to discuss mixed race/culture issues and advocacy.

Namaka Auwae is a mixed Hawaiian person living in Seattle. She has participated and worked with numerous local social justice-oriented non-profits. She is apart of National organization, Advocates For Youth, as a member of the Young Women of Color For Reproductive Justice Collective. The YWOC Collective is comprised of activists across the country organizing to decrease health disparities in communities of color. Namaka also has a penchant for writing and in her spare time, you can find her knitting or recklessly spending money on books. She is currently pursuing a degree in early education and teaching.

Beatriz Santos is a 14-year-old student, artist, and rising activist from Seattle, Washington. She attended Lake Washington Girls Middle School, where her interests in racial justice, activism, and racial identity were sparked. She is now a freshman at Cleveland High School where she continues to work towards racial justice and hopes to start a mixed race affinity group where more engaging discussions on being mixed race and finding your racial identity can happen.

“Majinn” Mike O’Neal is a queer mixed race African American dance artist and educator who utilizes his training in multiple dance styles to find and express his whole self. As a teacher, Majinn aims to help others become more confident in their bodies, express themselves and be confident speaking their voice on and off of the dance floor rather than just making people better dancers. One of Majinn’s biggest goals in dance is to spread the histories of street/club styles dance in and out of academia so that the culture are learned and more respected. As well as to give back to the communities that these art forms were created from.

Tracy Rector (Choctaw/Seminole) is a mixed-race filmmaker, curator, community organizer, and programmer. Currently, she is serving as the Managing Director of Storytelling at Nia Tero, a non-profit committed to supporting Indigenous governance and guardianship. She has directed and produced over 400 shorts and other films including the award-winning Teachings of the Tree People, March Point, Maiden of Deception Pass, and Ch’aak’ S’aagi. She is in production on her sixth feature documentary Outta the Muck with support from ITVS. As an impact producer, Tracy served on the team for the Emmy Award winning feature documentary Dawnland, which premiered on Independent Lens’ 2018/19 season to 2.1 million viewers in its opening week. Her work has also been featured in National Geographic, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian.
 
Tracy is the co-founder of Longhouse Media, a non-profit focused on galvanizing Indigenous and local communities through film production. Since 2005, she has worked with over 50 tribal nations and helped train 3,000 young people. Tracy has received the National Association for Media Literacy Education Award, 2016 Stranger Genius Award, and the Horace Mann Award for her work in utilizing media for social justice. She is a Firelight Media Fellow, WGBH Producer Fellow, Sundance Institute Lab Fellow, and Tribeca All Access Grantee. Tracy’s first major museum installation opened in June 2018 at the
Seattle Art Museum. Tracy serves as a Mize Foundation board member, senior programmer at the Seattle International Film Festival, and is in her second term as a Seattle Arts Commissioner. She is a mother of
two young men.

Photo: Zorn B. Taylor

Ancestral Lineages: European, Ilokano, Matao/CHamoru

Dakota Camacho is a multi-disciplinary artist / researcher working in spaces of indigenous life ways, performance, musical composition, community engagement, and education.

Camacho holds a Masters of Arts in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor of Arts in Gender & Women’s Studies as a First Wave Urban Arts and Hip Hop Scholar. 

Camacho is a chanter, adjunct instructor, and core researcher for I Fanlalai’an Oral History Project based at the University of Guåhan. 

Camacho co-founded I Moving Lab, an inter-national, inter-cultural, inter-tribal, and inter-disciplinary arts collective that creates community and self-funded arts initiatives to engage and bring together rural & urban communities, Universities, Museums, & performing arts institutions. 

Camacho has worked at festivals, universities, and community organizations as a public speaker, facilitator, composer and performer across Turtle Island (USA), Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Sweden, and South Africa.