ok family,
i am really beginning to enjoy finding out what black women are doing in and through performance. i must say i have been a bit pissed off about "going back to school" and writing a statement of purpose that says here i am a black woman who wants to study black women and the institution saying wonderful, and now that i am here, they act like i am speaking a different language, like i didn't say what i know i said.
but anyways. i am literally in hot pursuit of us (black women)cause i ain't really interested in what anybody else got to say right now. i have had a lifetime of all of that, it is time for some balance. so here is the most recent supa fly sista revolutionary artist i can across, i just hate that i am just meeting her. but here she is any way, in the flesh..
i'm just saying though...we so fresh!
found at www.culturalodyssey.org
RHODESSA JONES is Co-Artistic Director of the San Francisco acclaimed performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is an actress, teacher, singer, and writer. Ms. Jones is also the Founder and Director of the award winning "Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women" which is a performance workshop that is designed to achieve personal and social transformation with incarcerated women. Ms. Jones just returned from leading a workshop at La Mama International Symposium for Directors in Spoleto, Italy. In the spring of 2004 Ms. Jones was honored with an Honorary Doctorate Degree from California College of the Arts. During the winter semester Rhodessa was Visiting Artist in Residence at Stanford University /Institute for Diversity in the Arts. In February 2004 Rhodessa performed the role of "Ruby" in August Wilson's King Hedley II at the Lorraine Hansberry Theater.
In November 2003 she was presented with a “GOLDIE Lifetime Achievement Award" presented by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In May 2003 Ms. Jones was awarded a Non-Profit Arts Excellence Award by the San Francisco Business Arts Council. In June 2002 Ms. Jones received an Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater.
Throughout the Spring and Fall of 2002 she toured her most recent solo performance, Hot Flashes, Power Surges, and Private Summers. Some of the highlights of the tour included Anchorage, Alaska at Out North Contemporary Art House, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center's Shimberg Theater, and Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, CT. While in residence at Yale, Ms. Jones led workshops and conducted Master Classes for the MFA students. She also lectured at the African American Cultural Center at Yale University and was honored with a Master's Tea hosted by Faculty of the Yale School of Drama.
A series of lectures offered by Ms. Jones, has helped her forge a place as a major social scientist of our time. Among these lectures are the following titles, Creative Survival, Creative Performance, Theater for the Twenty-First Century, and Women Saving Their Own Lives. Most recently in October 2002, Rhodessa provided the keynote speech at the Cabrillo College Women's Studies Conference and the Center Force Summit 2002 Conference, "Inside-Out: Fostering Healthy Outcomes for the Incarcerated and Their Families".
Her most recent directing credits include Sekou Sundiata's "Blessing The Boats", Will Power's "The Gathering" and Deborah Edward's "From Whores to Matriarchs". Ms. Jones is currently a featured artist contributing to Building the Code: Understanding Community Based Arts in America, a research and publication project sponsored by the National Performance Network.
In January 2002, Ms. Jones starred in Regina Taylor's Urban Zulu Mambo at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco.
In the Fall of 2001, The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women's six month residency at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, produced its eighth work, "Can We get There By Candlelight?", an original work based on the ancient Sumerian Myth of Inanna. In November 2001, Ms. Jones performed her award winning solo "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women" at Fordham University's School of Divinity. At Fordham, she also participated in a panel, "Activism and Spiritualism in the 21st Century". In December of 2001, Rhodessa and two ex-offenders from The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, were in residence at Rutgers University's Center for the Critical Analysis. The residency included a lecture by Ms. Jones, a performance workshop, a performance perusing the works of The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, and a scholar's discourse on art as social change.
In the Winter of 2001, Ms. Jones was featured in Eve Ensler's award hit play, "The Vagina Monologues", produced by Theater on the Square. Following, in June 2001, her film collaboration "We Just Telling Stories" won "Best Documentary" at the San Francisco Black Film Festival. The film profiles Ms. Jones and her work with The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women in the San Francisco County jails. This award parallels the recent release of a book on Ms. Jones' work entitled, Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and the Theater for Incarcerated Women. This book was released in December 2001 by author Rena Fraden, Ph.D. with a forward by Professor Angela Davis.
In July 2000, Ms. Jones was a featured teacher at LaMama Umbria, an international theater-training workshop in Italy, hosted by LaMama ETC of New York. In May 2000, she directed the nationally acclaimed world premiere of Erin Cressida Wilson's Trail of Her Inner Thigh for Campo Santo at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. In the same year, Ms. Jones was honored as Working Woman of the Year by the Working Women's Theater Festival. She premiered her new show Hot Flashes, Power Surges, and Private Summers at this festival. "Hot Flashes" is one of Ms. Jones' most recent works in her long legacy as an innovative performance artist. She creates autobiographical and provocative material that integrates inter-disciplinary performance and that utilizes film, comedy, theater and movement.
Born in Florida to a migrant laborer family, Rhodessa Jones is a proud grandmother of her daughter's girl child Chaz.
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