Free Black Dirt
HOBT is thrilled to be working with Free Black Dirt to design and facilitate the MayDay Council.
Free Black Dirt is an artistic partnership formed by Minneapolis based collaborators Junauda Petrus and Erin Sharkey. Committed to creating original theatre and performance, hosting innovative events, organizing local artists, and promoting and supporting the emerging artists’ community in the Twin Cities, Free Black Dirt seeks to spark and engage in critical conversations.
Free Black Dirt is excited to engage in the work of designing and facilitating the MayDay Council with collaborator Lisa Marie Brimmer. Lisa comes to this work with invaluable experience from their work with Intermedia Arts and Cedar Cultural Center.
Mayday Council design, facilitation, and support are at the center of Free Black Dirt’s work. They are focusing on celebrating, healing, and dreaming MayDay into the future by stewarding a process to cultivate a passionate group of artists, community leaders, and activists focused on the future of MayDay. Next week stay tuned for an update announcing the MayDay Council Members!
As this work progresses Free Black Dirt and HOBT will be sharing many ways to get involved in co-creating the future of MayDay; the MayDay Council needs the support of many communities to realize these dreams.
Lisa Marie Brimmer
They/Them/Theirs
Lisa Marie Brimmer is an interdisciplinary artist living on Dakota and Anishinaabe lands. They are in ever-evolving relation with nature, ritual, and connection to their ancestors. Lisa Marie currently teaches at Century College, co-edited Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose, and Pride (MHS Press 2019), and is co-curator with Sherrie Fernandez Williams of the “Queer Voices Reading and Performance Series” presented in collaboration with Quatrefoil Library and Hennepin County Library. They also consult with Family Tree Clinic on an MSAB funded project, “Where Does Your Healing Come From?” which integrates art into the client experience at a sexual health clinic. Lisa Marie is a former Interim Executive Co-Director of The Cedar Cultural Center (2018), and held multiple roles at Intermedia Arts (2014-17). In their time with Intermedia, they worked with Creative Leadership and Artistic Development programs in coordination and managerial roles.
Junauda Petrus-Nasah
She/Her/Hers
Junauda Petrus-Nasah is a writer, pleasure activist, filmmaker and performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born on Dakota land. Her work centers around wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, an experimental arts production company. She is the writer and director of "Sweetness of Wild" a poetic-episodic film series themed around Blackness, queerness, biking, resistance, love and coming of age in Minneapolis. Her first YA novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them is out on Dutton Children’s. She lives in Minneapolis with her wife, child, and family.
Erin Sharkey
She/Her/Hers
Erin Sharkey is a writer and cultural producer based in Minneapolis. She is the co-founder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts production company called Free Black Dirt. Erin was a Bell Museum Artist-in-Residence, Loft Mentor Series mentee, VONA fellow, Jerome Travel and Study grantee, and Givens Foundation fellow. Her work as appeared in Brooklyn Quarterly, Paper Darts and Walker Sightlines and Primer Magazines and is editing a forthcoming publication on Milkweed Editions. In 2019, She was awarded the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant, and is currently producing, Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and teaching with Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop and Metro State University. Erin worked as the MayDay Parade and Ceremony Production Manager in 2016 and 2017 and was a consultant to the Parade Celebration in 2018.