Moor Mother

Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a national and international touring musician, poet, visual artist, and Professor of Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music. Her work speaks to many genres from electronic to free jazz and classical music. Camae's work has been featured at the Guggenheim Museum, The Met, Carnegie Mellon and Carnegie Hall, Documenta 15, the Berlin Jazz Festival, and the Glastonbury Festival. Through the lens and practice of Black Quantum Futurism the art she makes is a statement for the future, as well as a way to honor the present and its historic connections to a multitude of past realities and future outcomes. She specializes in practical concepts, but works in speculation and historical concepts. Moor Mother creates soundscapes using field sounds and archival sound collage in order to create sonic maps that allow us to journey to our buried histories and futures. She is an artist who, through writing, music, film, visual art, socially engaged art, and creative research, explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming oppressive linear temporalities into empowering, alternative temporalities. Her work seeks to inspire practical techniques of vision and agency against a forever expanding re -conquering of land, housing, and health in Black communities. Camae is a Pew Fellow, a The Kitchen Inaugural Emerging Artist Awardee, a Leeway Transformation Award, a Blade of Grass Fellow as part of Black Quantum Futurism, and a Rad Girls Philly Artist of the Year. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, WORM! Rotterdam residency, and the Creative Capital and CERN collide residency with Black Quantum Futurism. 

Pat Thomas

Pat Thomas studied classical piano from aged 8 and started playing Jazz from the age of 16. He has since gone on to develop an utterly unique style - embracing improvisation, jazz and new music. He has played with Derek Bailey in Company Week (1990/91) and in the trio AND (with Noble) – with Tony Oxley’s Quartet and Celebration Orchestra and in Duo with Lol Coxhill. 

"Sartorially shabby as Thomas may be, and on first impression even rather stolid, he has a somewhat imperious charisma that’s immediately amplified when he starts to play. Unlike other pianists whose virtuosity seems to be racing ahead of their thought processes Thomas always seems supremely in command of his gift, and his playing, no matter how free and ready to tangle with abstraction, always carries a charge of authoritative exactitude." - The Jazzmann

Imani Mason Jordan

Imani Mason Jordan (b. 1992, London) is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and curator interested in poetics and performance.

Imani has written numerous articles, reviews, essays, poems, plays and love letters, some of which they have published. Since 2016, they have developed a keen interest in poetics, oration, experimentation and practices of reading aloud, from which they have synthesised a performance practice that centres writing and collaboration as well as using the speaking voice as an instrument. After completing their MA in Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths in 2019, their pamphlet OBJECTS WHO TESTIFY was published by Taylor Le Melle at PSS.

Imani is currently working on their debut poetry collection, THE BOOK OF SLASH POEMS and their solo performance work TREAD/MILL. Recent performance/audio projects include: EARTHLY ACCOMPLICE (2023) with Felix Taylor at MACBA, Barcelona & Crosness Pumping Station, London; ATLANTIC RAILTON: LIVE (2021) with Ain Bailey at Serpentine Pavilion, London & WELCOME NOTE IN A WELCOME SPEECH (2019) with Libita Sibungu at Gasworks, London & Spike Island, Bristol.

Imani is Director of PAPERFLESH PUBLISHING, a multi-genre small press and editing studio for the intellectually rigorous, politically minded black writer. Imani has curated various exhibitions and public programmes alongside Rabz Lansiquot as Languid Hands (2019-) and SYFU (2018).

Alya Al-Sultani

Alya Al-Sultani is a dramatic soprano, improvising vocalist and opera-maker from Basrah, Iraq. Her work is focused on the themes of liberation and love. Her current work includes a trio with Pat Thomas and Khabat Abas (Manara) and with Robert Mitchell and Maggie Nicols, a duo with Maggie Nicols and an underground electronic / opera duo with GRANDMIXXER. She is working on a new opera with Jennifer Farmer, In The Teeth of the Wind, due to be debuted in 2026. She continues to be a student in the life-long study of maqam and Arabic music and has released albums of Iraqi folk songs and interpretations of Arabic poetry by living and past poets.

Her most recent releases include improvised solo opera suites "Three Ages of Woman/Mother", "Self Lost / Self Found" and "Return/Exile" and a protest album with Maggie Nicols "Free, Free". Her most recent release is "Immersion" with Robert Mitchell and Maggie Nicols and upcoming in September is Manara's debut album, both out on the UK label Discus.