The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival will present the 5th Annual Loving Prizes to leading storytellers of the Mixed experience on June 16, 2012 at 6:30p.m. at the Japanese American National Museum, 369 East First Street in downtown Los Angeles.
The Loving Prizes are awarded each year to artists who have shown a dedication to celebrating and illuminating the Mixed experience. Past recipients include best-selling writer James McBride, NFL star Hines Ward, Hapa artist Kip Fulbeck, scholar Dr. Maria P. P. Root, writer and educator Maya Soetoro-Ng, and writer and TV producer Angela Nissel.
This year, the prizes will be presented during Mixed Unplugged, a live event featuring music, comedy, dance and spoken word performances. This year’s host is veteran TV actress Erica Gimpel (Fame, Nikita) who will also perform from her newest album. Comedy Central’s popular comedic duo Key & Peele will also perform.
Khanisha Foster is Mixed Roots’ Live Events Producer. She is also a writer, an actress, and the Associate Artistic Director of 2nd Story, a Chicago-based collective of story-makers and story-lovers. Victoria Platt Tilford is the Live Event Co-Coordinator. Tilford, an actress, is honored to host the Festival’s Live Event for her fourth time. Nikki Hyde is the Live Event Co-Coordinator. As a stage manager in LA, Hyde currently manages the collaborative effort between Cornerstone Theater Company and Homegirl Café to create Café Vida.
The Festival, which takes place June 15-17, celebrates stories of the Mixed experience and stories of interracial and intercultural relationships, blended families and anyone who identifies with having mixed roots. A free three-day public event, the Festival brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial families and individuals for workshops, readings, and film screenings.
The 2012 Loving Prize recipients are:
Dr. G. Reginald Daniel is a leading scholar on issues of multiracial identity and teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 1989, he has taught “Betwixt and Between,†which is one of the first and the longest-standing university courses to deal specifically with the question of multiracial identity. Daniel’s books—More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (2002), Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (2006), and Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist (2012)—focus on the relationship between social structure and racial formation. Daniel is also a member of the Advisory Board of AMEA, MASC, the Advisory Council of the Mixed Heritage Center of MAVIN Foundation, and a former Advisory Board member of Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally). He is a co-founding editor of the recently launched Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies.
Kim Wayans and Kevin Knotts are the authors of the popular children’s book series, Amy Hodgepodge, about the adventures of a multiracial and multicultural girl. The husband-and-wife writing team was inspired to write the Amy Hodgepodge books because of their own increasingly blended family. Both Wayans and Knotts have also enjoyed considerable success on screen as well. Wayans—best known to audiences for her work on the groundbreaking sketch comedy show In Living Color and films like Dance Flick and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka—recently garnered rave reviews for her dramatic debut in the award-winning feature film Pariah. Knotts has guest-starred on such popular shows as Sabrina The Teenage Witch as well as My Wife and Kids, for which he also wrote. Knotts has penned three screenplays, one with Wayans, and the duo has created a pilot for a family sitcom that they are currently shopping to networks.
The Festival, a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, a non-profit organization, is produced by the co-hosts of the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat (www.mixedchickschat.com): award-winning actor and filmmaker Fanshen Cox, New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow, and actor and documentary filmmaker Jennifer Frappier.
The event is free and open to the public, however pre-registration is strongly encouraged. The complete Festival schedule can be found online at www.mxroots.org.
