Heritage Ambassadors

Bebonkwe

Bebonkwe / Jude Norris is a multi-media Plains Cree artist from Alberta, Canada, based in Brooklyn, NY. Bebonkwe's work embodies First Nations creative traditions in contemporary ways, reflecting the challenge & paradox of navigating deep cultural polarities and damage within colonized Indigenous territories, while transmuting the seemingly insurmountable into cultural continuance, celebration, lyricism and good medicine.

Dena Igusti

Dena Igusti is a NYC born and raised Indonesian Muslim poet, playwright, filmmaker, and producer. They are the author of CUT WOMAN (2022 Perennial Award Winner, 2020 Harvard Bookstore Staff Pick and Entropy Mag’s Best Of 2020-2021). Their work has been produced and performed at The Brooklyn Museum, The Apollo Theater, and several other venues internationally.

Hugo Moreno

Hugo Moreno is a Mexican American trumpet player and teacher working on Broadway and freelancing everything from mariachi to classical to experimental music. Growing up on the southern border of this country, he's lived in Sunset Park, Brooklyn since 2010 and relishes the daily unexpected and the things to yet be discovered. He's working on writing music that heals people.

Brandon Perdomo

Brandon Perdomo is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist fascinated with self-reflection and alterity, which serves as the engines for his work in visual and performance work, as well as socially engaged intervention. Perdomo’s work in public & oral history interviewing as a social practice provokes a reexamination & reclamation of narrative power, as well as interrogation of systems of assimilation. He’s a proud grandchild to Colombians, Sephardic Honduran/Mayans, and Greeks.

Araceli Poma

Araceli Poma is a two-time Latin Grammy nominee, an Ambassador of Afro and Andean Music of Peru, and a disseminator of Quechua through her songs and musical documentaries. Her work is defined by her interest in making visible the fundamental contribution of women in music and her commitment to the union and integration of cultures.

Beareather Reddy

Beareather Reddy, vocalist/songwriter/actress/producer, radio host; a native of Sylvania, Georgia, received a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts in Performance Arts. She is the producer of the Big Eyed Blues Festival, the Ocean Hill Folk Festival, and has introduced national and international performers to the community. Ms. Reddy is the founder and president of the Brooklyn Blues Society and considers herself a "Champion for the Blues". She received the "Woman of Distinction Award" in 2016 and was inducted in the New York Blues Hall of Fame.

Asia Sztencel

Asia Sztencel pursues artistic community research about the experience of immigrants in relationship to the landscape memory. Sztencel highlights landscape in her paintings, and her social practice art to craft narratives for feelings of exile, recall, and longing. 

Esraa Warda

Esraa Warda is New York's emerging dance artist and educator specializing in Algerian traditional dance forms and has been featured in the New York Times, VOGUE Arabia, and as one of the "100 Women" of 2022 by BBC.  A child of the Algerian diaspora, Warda is a cultural warrior advocating for the representation & preservation of North African women-led dance traditions and the decolonization of euro-centricity, orientalism, and patriarchy in dance.