The roster of artists is currently being updated.
Confirmed Spoken Word Artists:
Ben Falealili
Ben Falealili grew up on the west side of Long Beach, CA. He recently graduated from San Diego State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology. Ben currently works in youth development with the YMCA Youth Institute.
Terisa Sigatonu
At the age of 23, Terisa Tinei Siagatonu has already established herself as a poet, spoken word artist, and arts educator. Born and rooted in the Bay Area, her emergence into the spoken word world as a queer Samoan womyn and activist has granted her the opportunities to perform on stages ranging from San Francisco’s historical Herbst Theatre to the Womyn’s Stage at the 2010 Oakland PRIDE Festival, sharing the mic with artists such as Beau Sia, Ise Lyfe, Rebel Diaz, George Watsky, and Chinaka Hodge. Throughout her journey, she has performed at events ranging from Youth Speaks’ 13th Annual Bringing the Noise for Martin Luther King, Jr. to San Jose’s Polynesian Heritage Festival and UC Berkeley’s 3rd and 4th Annual Queer and Asian Conference. An alumni of the University of California Santa Cruz, she was a member of the 2010 and 2011 UCSC Kinetic Poetic Poetry Slam Teams, helping her team take 2nd place at college nationals in April 2010.
In addition to performing, she is also a community organizer, having worked as an intern and poet-mentor for Youth Speaks Inc., the leading nonprofit organization for spoken word performance, education, and youth development programs in the country, to organizing on a grassroots level with groups such as One Love Oceania, a queer Pacific Islander womyn’s organization from the Bay Area, the Samoan Community Development Center of San Francisco, EPIC of Los Angeles, and Engaging Education of UCSC.
Alongside performing and organizing, she currently resides in Los Angeles, CA working at UCLA as the Project Director of PIER: the Pacific Islander Education and Retention project, a project that works with Pacific Islander youth around access into higher education.
