Creating New Futures through the Arts

Authors, artists, and activists will share how film, music, public art, and other art practices can help build communities and imagine new futures.

Ben Caldwell is an arts educator, independent filmmaker, and creator of the KAOS Network, whose goal is to be the bridge that connects South LA communities with the new technology of the 21st century as a vanguard in all the art forms. Caldwell is the co-author and subject of KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell. 

Robeson Taj Frazier is a writer, associate professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and director of the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg (IDEA). He is the author of The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination, producer of the documentary film It's Yours: A Story About Hip Hop and the Internet, and host of the PBS Digital Studios production, Hip Hop and the Metaverse.

Jonathan Leal is an assistant professor of English at USC. Originally from the Rio Grande Valley, the South Texas region located at the border of the U.S. and Mexico, and now based in Los Angeles, the Latino author, composer, and scholar creates writing, music, and integrative arts projects that amplify creative resistances to bordered life. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop, co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision, and co-creator of numerous musical projects, including, most recently, After Now.

Brettany Shannon, co-author of Co-Creative Placekeeping in Los Angeles: Artists and Communities Working Together, is an urban scholar researching the intersection of art, technology, public space, and community participation. Shannon is the co-editor of Planning for AuthentiCITIES and is an adjunct professor at California State Polytechnic Institute, Pomona; California State University, Northridge; and Woodbury University.

Moderator: Annette Kim is associate professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy and affiliated faculty at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Her books include Sidewalk City: Re-Mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City and Learning to be Capitalists: Entrepreneurs in Vietnam's Transition Economy. Her current research project, ethniCITY, remaps how race and ethnicity shapes spatial patterns in Los Angeles. She founded and directs SLAB (USC's Spacial Analysis Lab) an helped found the RAP collective about race, arts, and placemaking.