BIOGRAPHIES

Ushka is a Sri Lankan-born, Brooklyn-based deejay traversing genres across electronic club & bass music. She deejays from the perspective of a dancer, blending a wide range of global club music from South Asian rhythms to afrobeat, queer club music to dembow, dancehall to soca, and more. She has performed across the U.S, Mexico, and Canadaincluding at institutions such as Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center, MoMA PS1, American Museum of Natural History, Rubin Museum, The Shed, Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, and Montreal’s Fondation Phi, and NYC’s SummerStage.

Ushka has been a staple in NYC’s queer nightlife, having run the iBomba party for six years and djing parties such as Papi Juice, Gush, Ragga, Bubble-T, Yellow Jackets Collective’s Lunar New Year, Moonshine, Basement

Bhangra and more. When she’s not djing, she’s an immigrant rights and climate justice advocate. You can follow her on twitter or instagram at @ty_ushka.

Singing and rapping in Lingala, French, English, Tshiluba, and Kikongo, Pierre Kwenders similarly weaves his stories across the boundaries of language and geography. José Louis and the Paradox of Love is a culmination of personal growth and the musical dexterity he has honed over the years, converging his strong songwriting capabilities with the bravado he possesses as a DJ. The album, which was awarded the prestigious Polaris Music Prize, explores an ongoing search to grasp the universal complexities of romance, sometimes through the lens of Kwenders’ own intimate experiences.

Mykki Blanco: Finding fame

first as a fearless noise rap poet, he published a book From The Silence Of Duchamp To The Noise

Of Boys. Then what started as a video art project about a “teenage drag rapper” transformed into two years of Blanco living as a transgender woman in his personal life. Though eventually not transitioning, Mykki Blanco graduated in real life as well as artistically into the non-binary, gender-queer, post-homo-hop musical artist that we see before us today. Needless to say, it’s impossible to pigeonhole Blanco, and his unique and beautiful sound is no exception.

Amassing a vast online following with a savvy and savage social media output, Mykki is hailed online as a digital warrior princess who rules across the underground music scene with mixtapes like Gay Dog Food, cult hits like “Kingpinning”, and sensational videos like “Coke White”, “Starlight”, “The Initiation”, “Wavvy”, and “Haze Boogie Life”. Blanco’s output to date has been hailed as razor sharp, ahead of its time and sometimes deliciously far out. Mykki Blanco’s referential framework is both archival and futuristic: a myriad of culture references, spiritual anecdotes, designer labels, makeup brands, hippie jargon, Fendi here and Snapchat there – all perfectly reflecting the creative dialogue and digital landscape we live in.

Collis Browne has played and produced almost every conceivable genre of music from free jazz to experimental ambient to soul to psychedelic folk to techno, and pop of all affections. He/they have performed on 4 continents in places as diverse as the MoMA PS1 in New York, the prestigious Museum of Islamic

Art in Qatar, Beirut Art Centre in Lebanon, and the PHI Centre in Montreal; as well as having a successful tech career and leading the internationally recognized environmental justice nonprofit Slow Factory.

Fogo Azul NYC is the byproduct of Batala New York . In June of 2016, Batala New York had a schism and from those ashes emerged Fogo Azul NYC. As of 2022, Fogo Azul NYC has expanded to become New York City’s most powerful women, trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming community musical group.