Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus, known professionally as Beabadoobee @radvxz or Bea Kristi, is a Filipino-English singer and songwriter.
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"When I was younger, I wrote a lot of stories and a lot of poetry, and I think that's the best way that I like to learn. That's how my mum taught me a lot of things and I learn a lot from my own experiences in life. So I feel like it's worked out for me, and then if I sing songs about my life and tell stories, I think it makes everything more relatable to everyone.”
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"I spent too much time while growing up trying to find someone who looked like me that made music I liked, so I want to be that person for someone else, even if it's only just for one other girl.”
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#beabadoobee #music #womeninmusic #empowerment #representation #songwriter #storyteller ...

“Magic, historical narrative, themes of loyalty. Investigate these ideas and find direction. Advocates for a deeper understanding, to question, highlight and archive nuanced elements of cultures that may be otherwise overlooked.”
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Chinaedu Nwadibia is a Nigerian Photographer who graduated from the Yale University, MFA Photography program in 2022. She earned her BA in Film and Photo from Howard University in 2011.
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“Nwadibia believes in the functions of portraiture, storytelling and the supernatural. The orality of her Nigerian and African American heritage has nurtured a keen observational ear that guides her visual work. Using photography, sculpture and performance, she advocates for herself and others, illuminating the spaces just out of view and prompting a further investigation into how one perceives their surroundings.”
#chinaedunwadibia #photography #portrait #supernatural #advocate #empowerment #representation #visualstorytelling ...

Gabrielle Bates @gabrielle_bates_ is a writer and visual artist originally from Birmingham, Alabama. Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), a collection of poems, is her first book.
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"I am always thinking about connection, which means I am always thinking about distance, which means I am always thinking about a here and a there—to some extent—in place or in time.”
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"I used to feel the words ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ like targets on my back, as if they were synonymous with ‘prey’, and I felt their categories like suffocating bags; in writing Judas Goat, I was contending with that trapped, threatened feeling a lot. I’m grateful to bring a wider, truer, more varied understanding of those categories to my life and writing now. Over time, I’ve let go of many stories about what a woman and a mother can and should be, and that’s been freeing. I now feel the category ‘woman’ to be incredibly capacious. It has room for what feels, to me, like an almost endless range of experiences, bodies, desires, questions.”
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#gabriellebates #poetry #poem #author #womeninart #storyteller #empowerment #representation #connection #time #place #distance #bodies #desires #understanding ...

Angela Garbes @angelagarbes is a writer and speaker based in Seattle Washington. Her newest book title “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change” was a national bestseller and was A New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022.
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In her book her term Mother is not restricted by those who have given birth or to a specific gender but to the art of caring, the act of “mothering”.
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"It was extremely difficult to write! (As was the knowledge, as it was happening, that I would be writing about it. Writers are such traitors to our families.) Writing about my body, committing those feelings to the page honestly, is one of my biggest challenges, but I believe it is worth it—both for me and for readers. “
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"I could not survive without my community! I’ve nurtured mine slowly and deliberately, over the course of many years and thousands of meals, playdates, dance parties, work parties, phone and FaceTime calls, backyard hangs, postcards, tears, hugs, texts, vacations, awkward conversations, walks, misunderstandings, and help, asked for and given. “
#Angelagarbes #writer #speaker #motheing #socialchange #community #collaboration #womenwriters #empowerment #mothers #representation #femaleempowerment ...

"My compositions examine an uneasiness and balance simultaneously: feminine figures often bend and reach in gestures of an empathetic connection, revealing solidarity between impassive yet vulnerable forms.”
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Lauren dela Roche @roach_coache is a self-taught artist living in St Louis, Missouri. An avid reader, Dela Roche cites the magical realist novels of Murakami and Kathy Acker’s punk poetry as influential to her practice.
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Lauren creates dynamic worlds that centralized themselves in the female body. Mixing patterns and colors her works tell stories that are up for interpretation, but are never without connection. Her interior spaces are filled with animals and flowers, creating movement in dreamlike settings that comment on domestic spaces with a nod to greek mythology.
#laurendelaroche #womeninart #domesticspace #storyteller #feminitity #connection #solidarity #vulnerability #color #painter #empowerment #represenation #femaleempowerment ...

Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi- channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual.
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About her work it has been said that, "With her expansive and genre-defying practice—photography, videos, mixed-media installations, text works, performances and curatorial work—she continues to critically reimagine the space of the gallery to be accessible for wider Indigenous audiences and to uphold new understandings of beauty.”"
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"The Sioux generosity, one of our virtues. But even thinking about art, we’re making art that’s not for ourselves. You have this image that has to come out. So you create it. And then it keeps living, then it lives again when people view it, it lives in the gallery, and then it lives with their experience, and then it lives when they talk about it. And it lives when art circulates. So that giving of pleasure is extended beyond just one viewer looking at the work.”
#danaclaxton #filmmaker #womeninart #photographer #indigenousbeauty #spirituality #womeninart #empowerment #representation #storyteller ...

Kelly Lee Owens @kellyleeowens is a Welsh electronic musician and producer. She released her first album in 2017 and her follow-up album, Inner Song, was released in August 2020. Her third studio album LP.8 was released on 29 April 2022. She has collaborated with musicians like Bjork and St. Vincent and was invited to write the official theme song for the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
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“Working with electronic music actually made me go back and reassess some of the music I’d heard in the 90s: Chemical Brothers, Leftfield, Underworld, Prodigy, Aphex Twin; artists who created a different kind of sonic experience. Aphex’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, that was a gateway album for me. It took me somewhere else! Oh, and I also need to mention New Order. Working class background, again. And they had a woman, Gillian Gilbert, on keyboards. That was seriously important; to see other women out there on the frontline. Showing us that electronic music wasn’t just a boys’ club.
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Most recently the musician has partnered with Haeckels to create a unisex fragrance.“This fragrance is something close to my heart – and what initially started out at creating a scent to accompany an album, has gone way beyond that,”

#kellyleeowens #electronicmusic #womeninmusic #producer #bjork #stvincent #fifa #womensworldcup #haeckels #womenproducers #london @fifaworldcup @haeckels ...

Bambou Gili @bambou.gili lives and works in New York and earned a BA in Psychology & Studio Art from the New York University.
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In hues of blue, green, and purple she draws on contemporary and historical resources and 16th and 18th century portraiture. With these various styles and magnificent color pallets her work depicts topics such as isolation, vulnerability and race with playfulness and intrigue.
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“For me, it’s much easier to loosen reality at night. In the day, there’s clarity in how light defines the shapes of our surroundings. At night, light bends and contorts familiar shapes and transforms the world according to whatever silhouettes the brain can make sense of. Your own psychology plays an interesting part in constructing this terrain. If you’re feeling peaceful, moonlight may turn the landscape into an ethereal dreamscape; if you’re paranoid, it may create an eerie shadowland. “
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#bambougili #painter #womeninart #contemporaryart #isolation #race #representation #portrait #nightscenes #psychology #empowerment #colortheory #colortherapy ...

Kayla Mak @kaylamak10 was born in February 2003 in Rye Brook, NY. She is of Japanese, Chinese, and Cuban descent and currently studies ballet, pointe, jazz, lyrical, contemporary, Hip Hop, and tap.
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She is now in her first year at Juilliard.
She is such a beautiful dancer.
#kaylamak #ballet #jazz #lyrical #contemporary #hiphop #tap #julliard #dancer #empowerment #movement ...

"I was just really lucky that I had parents that were conscious of my connection to my history. My mom would go above and beyond — like having a wall in our house that was dedicated to Colombian history. The music that would play in the house would only be cumbia, and vallenato and salsa. At home, I wasn’t allowed to speak English. Now I can recognise that it’s something beautiful that I could walk in and feel like I walked into a different country. I walked into Colombia every time I walked into my house. When I left, I was in Canada.”
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Jessie Reyez @jessiereyez is a Columbian/Canadian singer. Her sophomore album “YESSIE” was released last year.
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“I’ve made more of a conscious effort to be better to myself, be healthier and be kinder, extend myself the grace that I extend to other people. And I think it’s shown up in my music, too. It’s just more healing. The toxic is still there a little, because I’m not perfect and I’m still working on things. But there’s an arc. I was gonna call it ‘Self’ originally, but then the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I’m gonna make it general. I’ve never made music for other people — I’ve always made it for me.”
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#jessiereyez #singer #songwriter #rapper #womeninmusic #empowerment #representation #bekind #columbian #canadian ...

Francesca Sesana Arbeláez @francescasesana is a Colombian designer who has been building A MODO MIO @amodomiostore for 6 years. The brand invites women to dare to be themselves. Francesca's challenge is to design garments that incorporate different embroidery techniques, exclusive prints and materials, creating unique garments that break the mold, that make forms of expression available to each woman, that are magic and transmit magic.
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Her clothing highlights moments and experiences, playing with symbols and realities that characterize us and thus creates pieces that attract attention and offers an unconventional garment.
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“A MODO MIO is a declaration of intent: my eyes see life like this... that different, that many colors, that much... Or little. This is my story, told my way, because I want to change the rules for better, more generous and calm ones, I want conversations that start with a piece of clothing and end with a change in the way we perceive each other.”
#amodomio #francescasesanaarbelaez #clothing #fashion #expressyourself #perception #empowerment #magic #bogotafashionweek ...

@sopopomo Dan Lam’s tactile, technicolor sculptures use unconventional materials to playfully tread a line between allure and repulsion. Made of painted polyurethane foam and often covered in spikes, her blob-like pieces that appear to melt and drip .
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Lam began experimenting with the possibilities of foam after receiving her MFA from Arizona State University, and she has continued to test its limits by scaling up. While her pieces appear otherworldly, Lam steadily draws inspiration from the everyday, taking cues from nature and the human body.
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"The most consistent reaction to my work is, “I want to touch it,” so that poses an interesting relationship between the viewer and the art, and it even contributes to the idea that they’re alive. I’ve been thinking about what it means when someone sees something, and they want to understand it with more than just their eyes. Thermochromic paint is heat sensitive, so when someone touches it, it reacts to them. It’s unexpected because, in the art world, you’re not supposed to touch things. If there are enough bodies in the room, the painted surface will warm up enough to change colors, so even without touching, you can still interact. I’m tempting the viewer in a more direct way with the thermochromic pieces. I don’t know if it alleviates the curiosity, or if it creates even more, and I like that tension of wanting to touch but not being able to.“
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"I want them to have that illusion of being alive.”
#danlam #sculptures #blobs #psychedelic #figures #melt #drip #womeninarts #sculptureartist ...

“Our planet is in crisis and our polluting systems need an overhaul. So first, let’s be the change we want to see– let’s be ocean and earth heroes, for a better planet right now and for future generations. Our challenges promote individual awareness and education, in effort to fuel systemic change. ”
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Founded by a surfing sisterhood, Changing Tides Foundation @changingtidesfoundation was born from a desire to create a community of people of all genders, shapes, colors and sizes who feel connected to the sea.
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The vision at the Changing Tides Foundation is to create a community that connects everyone to humanity, kindness, the planet, and each other.
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"Our strategy is to encourage individual action so together we can create collective change for equity, justice and a healthier future.
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“Everyone is welcome at this table of positive change."
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Their Women’s Outreach Mentorship Program (WOMP) is beginning in Spring, 2023. In 2022, WOMP was a huge success serving nearly 30 underserved teenage girls in North County San Diego and offering volunteer opportunities for over 30 surfers and volunteers around the community.
#changingtidesfoundation #outreach #protectouroceans #protectourplanet #empowerment #surfers #womeninsports #getoutside #communitybuilding ...

Andrea Landa's @andrealandaofficial connection with fashion emerged in an innate way. Since she was a little girl she has been surrounded by patterns, buckles and countless leather skins. Materials that were part of her mother´s workshop, a space where she grew up seeing the work of Colombian artisans and sharing the creative process involved in the design. Her family heritage together with her creative nature is what inspired her work to work with leather and handcrafted techniques.
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Given that her pieces are made in limited series, Andrea offers her clients pieces that are exclusive and individual. She is passionate about working with leather and believes that this material is the most enduring and impactful there is. Combining ancestral roots with contemporary sophistication, Andrea Landa’s line offers timelessly elegant pieces to those who wear them.
#andrealanda #leatherwork #leatherclothing #bogotafashionweek #empowerment #limitededition #fashiondesigner #bogota ...

"I was born in Herat, Afghanistan under the reign of the Taliban regime. My family walked hundreds of miles to Iran in the rain and snow to escape. I grew up an impoverished, undocumented, refugee street child in Tehran. Without official papers, I could not attend school until a local non-governmental organization offered assistance; they provided a basic education to undocumented, refugee Afghan children.
At the age of ten, I was sold into forced marriage. The contract fell through. My family again tried to sell me when I was sixteen, I escaped.
Witnessing the injustices of the world, and my friends swiftly disappearing as they were forced to marry, I wrote the song “Daughters for Sale”. With the aid of an Iranian filmmaker, a music video was recorded."
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Sonita Alizadeh @sonitalizadeh uses her music as a tool to raise awareness to end child marriages.
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In her song “Daughters for Sale” she raps “I scream to make up for a woman’s lifetime silence, I scream on behalf of the deep wounds on my body. I scream for a body exhausted in its cage — a body that broke under the price tags you put on it.”
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"If I can change [my parents’] minds with my music,” she says, “then maybe I can change the world.”
#sonitaalizadeh #rapper #activist #endchildmarriage #useyourvoice #empowerment #representation #awareness #live #fight ...

Charlotte Edmonds @charlotteedmonds____ is a British choreographer, dancer and filmmaker whose work honors classical and contemporary dance as pure art forms. Her training at The Royal Ballet Lower School, Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, and her masters in choreography from Central School of Ballet, has given her the technical understanding to break ground as a choreographer.

Her movements are packed with awareness, insight and vulnerability. She talks often about the importance of how you walk into a space and being open to conversation, questions and empowering her dancers.
Her work has been featured on NOWNESS and she has collaborated with Belstaff, Nike and Burberry

In her classes her students feel safe. "
The atmosphere in Charlotte's classes lies amongst the most positive and encouraging that I have experienced. Her effective personal feedback and guidance on how to achieve the finest movements were always constructive, especially when we explored the beautiful ideas she produced. I felt that the classes challenged me to leave my comfort zone, break the habit of relying on movements that felt comfortable and instead directing my attention to discover something that felt unnatural. I loved this method of developing curiosity and I learned an enormous amount from this process.”

"A true collaborative artist. Efficient , organised and bursting with ideas.”

#charlotteedmonds #choreographer #royalballetschool #nowness #dance #movement #expressyourself #moveyourbody #empowerment #contemporarydance #ballet ...

Esther Choi @choibites began her professional education at the early age of 14. Her formal training as a chef began at New York City’s Institute of Culinary Education (ICE),

Esther is Chef driven by her Korean roots. Inspired by the age-old technique of her Korean grandmother’s cooking, Chef Esther believes that food is the ultimate expression of a country’s culture. Esther is chef/owner of mŏkbar and mŏkbar Brooklyn, as well as chef/partner of Ms. Yoo.

"I followed my grandmother everywhere, and where she loved to be was in the kitchen. Naturally, I was in the kitchen with her a lot. I wasn’t intentionally learning it, I just grew up with it. She was an amazing cook. She grew all of her own vegetables in her garden because you couldn’t get Korean vegetables where we were living. We had to take weekly trips to Philadelphia because there was one Korean supermarket to bulk up on all of our Korean ingredients and then she would make everything from scratch.”

"I was waiting for the moment to cook Korean food, but I was not going to go work at a Korean restaurant. That was no way. I couldn’t learn it from someone. No one knows Korean food like I do.”

"One of the hallmarks of traditional Korean cuisine is the use of fresh, seasonal ingredients in everyday cooking. Not only is eating seasonally delicious, its sustainable and healthy. At mokbar, our menu is constantly changing to incorporate the freshest ingredients from places like the Union Square Greenmarket or the Korean markets in Flushing, Queens.”
#estherchoi #mokbor #newyorkcity #koreanfood #ramen #seasonalingredients #sustainable #korean #empowerment #womenchef #supportwomen #representation @mokbar_nyc ...

Fragmented faces and repetitive imagery, carefully sculpted and given new life. Susana Blasco’s @descalza handy work reshapes and reframes history. Susana is a graphic designer and collage artists from Zaragoza, London, Bilbao that worked in advertising agencies for a decade before breaking out on her own and starting her own agency.
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"I usually describe myself with the phrase “cut and change”. I like experimentation, trying new things, not taking anything for granted and having the feeling that I haven't adjusted to anything. I am very obsessive and when something interests me I devour it. In life I change and connect one obsession with the next. For a few years now I have felt a compulsive attraction to old photographs and I have worked on them from collage, but I feel that this obsession is mutating. It took me many years to call myself a graphic designer, also some to feel comfortable with the term illustrator, and now I'm in the phase where labeling myself as an artist scares me and attracts me at the same time. I guess I'm a cocktail of all three."
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"Suelo describirme con la frase “corto y cambio”. Me gusta la experimentación, probar cosas nuevas, no dar nada por sentado y tener la sensación de que no me he acomodado a nada. Soy muy obsesiva y cuando algo me interesa lo devoro. En la vida voy mudando y conectando una obsesión con la siguiente. Desde hace unos años he sentido una atracción compulsiva por las fotografías antiguas y las he trabajado desde el collage, pero siento que esa obsesión va mutando. Me costó muchos años llamarme diseñadora gráfica, también alguno a sentirme cómoda con el término ilustradora, y ahora estoy en la fase en que la que etiquetarme como artista me asusta y me atrae a la vez. Supongo que soy un cóctel de las tres.”
#susanablasco #collageartist #graphicdesigner #cutpaper #contemporaryart #history #empowerment #womeninart #fragments #zaragoza #London #bilbao #experiments ...

Hope Tala @hopetala , is a British singer-songwriter. Her musical style has been described as pulling from R&B, Latin, neo soul, and bossa nova.
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“I’m someone who doesn’t like being put in boxes,” she says. “I think most people would probably say that, but I’m a mixed-race person, I’m a queer person, I’m a gender-queer person. So, saying ‘I’m just this one thing’ is never how I’ve been since the day I was born.”
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Hope’s music transcends the boundaries typical genres and is an amalgamation of the mix of music she was raised on. She made Obama’s “Favorite Music of 2020” playlist with her song “All My Girls like to Fight"
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"Sometimes, when I write songs, it feels very natural to put a rap verse in there and change up the texture and flow of the verse. I think rap in particular is so poetic, and I definitely consider myself to be a poet. Rap is also a very male-dominated industry and creative space. I just want to get stuck in and shake things up a bit.”
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“My biggest hope is that people listen to it as a project and can return to it in five or ten years’ time. So much is transient and forgettable now and I don’t want to make something that’s like that.”
#hopetala #music #singer #songwriter #womeninmusic #empowerment #representation #singersongwriter ...

"BLACK BARBIE: A DOCUMENTARY is part of a broader movement to increase understanding of the importance of representation for Black women. As is too often overlooked, because they belong to two minority groups, Black Women tend to fall through the cracks in arguments and studies about representation. To address this issue, we ask that Black female cultural producers like the filmmaker, shape narratives that speak to Black women and girls’ reality, experience, and vision.”
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On this film Beulah Mae Mitchell who spent 45-years working at Mattel and other Black women in the film talk about their own, complex, varied experience of not seeing themselves represented, and how Black Barbie’s transformative arrival affected them personally.
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Lagueria Davis @lagueriadavis is the director of this film (and 12 year project).
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"The process was interesting, because it’s research;… “Okay, older women, my aunt’s age, of a certain age, collect Black dolls. Who else could we get who collects Black dolls? Who else could we get who can talk about Black dolls?” So that kind of was where the jumping-off point was. And then that opens a world to designers who make dolls, and so it’s kind of like a rolling effect, like a snowball."
#blackbarbie #mattel #beulahmaemitchell #barbie #lagueriadavis #documentary #history #empowerment #representation #filmmaker #director ...

“Inspiration for stories is all around us, you just have to choose a subject matter that inspires you and moves you.” From the streets of San Francisco to the modern rodeo in Oakland, Gabriela Hasbun @gabrielahasbun finds her inspiration in stories told by people on the streets, in communities and on the radio.
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“For me, this process has been very educational. I’m an immigrant into a multiple immigrant country. I’m Palestinian, but I was born in El Salvador. And so figuring out where I fit in has been very controversial for me. There’s not a lot of people like me here. My tribe is not here in this country. I’m always looking for a place to fit in. And I think that’s where my journey really meshed with the cowboys because I saw this big, lovely community of people and they were so welcoming. And then I started learning the history, of course. The projects that I’m interested in are the ones that I’m learning more deeply about American history and African American culture, something I never had an education on."
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"I feel like all of my work, really the core of my work is really in being truthful and honest and really getting to the core of who these people are. And so that is the only hope that I can have as a photographer is to show my subjects in a very iconic, proud light.”
#gabrielahabsun #photographer #portraitphotography #modernrodeo #alicewaters #oakland #sanfrancisco #history #culture #empowerment #representation ...