Arts Orange County in collaboration with the OC Great Park invites you and your students to take advantage of an extraordinary opportunity to see Marc Bamuthi Joseph at the Orange County Great Park Arts Complex in Irvine on Saturday, June 16 at 6 p.m. Admission is free!

Joseph has been hailed as one of America's vital voices in performance, arts education and artistic curation. He is an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Artist Award (2012) and has graced the cover of the Smithsonian Magazine after being named one of America's top young innovators in the arts and sciences.

He is the artistic director of the 7-part HBO documentary "Russell Simmons presents Brave New Voices" and an inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship (2006), which annually recognizes 50 of the country's "greatest living artists." He is currently maintaining a dedicated practice in performance while serving as the director of performing arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

After appearing on Broadway as a young actor, Joseph has developed several poetically based works for the stage that have toured across the U.S., Europe and Africa. These include Word Becomes Flesh, Scourge and the break/s, which co-premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays and the Walker Arts Center in the spring of 2008. Word Becomes Flesh was re-mounted in December 2010 as part of the National Endowment for the Arts' "American Masterpieces" series, and will tour throughout North America and Hawaii through 2013. In addition, he wrote the commissioned libretto Home in 7 for the Atlanta Ballet in 2011 and is directing Dennis Kim's Tree City Legends at Intersection for the Arts in 2012.

A gifted and nationally acclaimed educator and essayist, he has lectured at more than 200 colleges and universities, been a popular commentator on National Public Radio and carried adjunct professorships at Stanford University, Lehigh University, Mills College and the University of Wisconsin. Joseph's proudest work has been with Youth Speaks, where he mentored 13- to 19-year-old writers and curated the Living Word Festival and Left Coast Leaning. He is the co-founder of Life Is Living, a national series of one-day festivals designed to active under-resourced parks and affirm peaceful urban life through hip-hop arts and focused environmental action.

June 1, 2012  :  Posted by Pat Wayne

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