Come together with Curate Shiloh Sophia and the Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color and Culture from MUSEA to learn, grow and heal together as we weave through the framework of the arts of justice and friendship. All justice movements have always had art and song, let's become the voices and images of the future. The time is when?

Now. Right now! Let's gather!

Let's gather to create, sing and discover the pathway forward together. Attend from anywhere in the world live and receive access for 6 months to watch anytime.

This experience is BASED on live events in the studio from MUSEA in Sonoma and will be recorded in real-time and shared with YOU. VERY exciting!

BAY AREA in-person chance to Gather Those in the Bay Area please choose to join us in person in Sonoma on June 3rd at the Sebstiani Theatre with Pratibha Parmar and Alice Walker available via a separate ticket here

JOIN US FOR AN EXPERIENCE TO REMEMBER

GATHER and CONNECT with women who are in motion with resistance and the arts and our global community for conversation

WATCH and LEARN from three influential films about social justice, human rights, and friendship as an educational framework for where we have been and where we are going - watch prior to June 11. Details will be provided.

ENGAGE and HONOR with Award-winning Filmmaker Pratibha Parmar and Alice Walker LIVE from MUSEA Center in Sonoma with Curate Shiloh Sophia

DEVELOP and SHARE your stand regarding race, equity, justice, and allyship - creating clarity in collaboration and friendship

ACTIVATE your stand for justice through the creation of an Arts of Justice Activism poster that represents YOUR stand.

EVERYTHING IS RECORDED and YOU HAVE 6 MONTHS TO WATCH SO YOU CAN JOIN LIVE OR WATCH LATER. YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS THIS EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE!

Summary of Experiences

Register and begin planning for our experience and getting supplies prepared. All details will be provided upon registration.
Watch 3 films by Award Winning Filmmaker Pratibha Parmar to awaken your life - the thread of all three films is that they feature our guest, Alice Walker. You will do this on your own time BEFORE June 11. Details will be provided, and these are an additional $33 since it goes through KALI FILMS.
Enjoy curated footage recorded live from events in Sonoma the weekend before. Including Curate Shiloh Sophia in conversation over two days with Alice and Pratibha about friendship, justice, resistance, and a look at where we have been and where we are now. Including a recording from the June 4th LIVE event with an in-studio audience right here in our very own MUSEA Center. It is a conversation not to be missed.
Create an Arts of Justice Poster in this daylong class rooted in Intentional Creativity in action with Shiloh Sophia, Sumaiyah Wysdom Yates, Anasuya Isaacs, Milagros Suriano-Rivera, Lauren Adorno-Weatherford, and Mary MacDonald live from MUSEA - or watch the recording.
Join MUSEA's Sacred ECHOES for conversations on race, justice, creativity, and allyship - this is essential wisdom with two group calls - optional. An opening call and closing call - all calendaring details will be provided to you.

There will be dancing, there will be singing. There will be enough love to go around.

This is THE EDUCATION you have been seeking to take
your informed activism to the next level.

Hello and Thank you for your interest in our global gathering. This HIGHLY Curated event is based on and inspired by the two days of Sonoma events - made possible for our global virtual community.

You can participate in this Virtual global gathering at ANY TIME for the next 6 months. This event works WITH your schedule. Access is continuous and includes access to a dedicated private group where you can post and participate via our iMUSEA app accessible on your smartphone and computer

Ready to register?

For over three decades, Pratibha Parmar’s body of work includes landmark, life-changing films; such as Warrior Marks and Beauty in Truth, both featuring Alice Walker, Queer South Asian films, Khush and Nina’s Heavenly Delights, and revolutionary, iconic films like A Place of Rage, that features Angela Davis and June Jordan. Her most recent film is, My Name Is Andrea, a stunning retelling of the story of Andrea Dworkin.

Parmar’s films are rooted in deep soulful storytelling, and they invite the viewer to enter into the visceral and the beautiful. How she accomplishes both, making accessible what is hard to hear, and generating a desire to dive into the story is a wonder to those of us who are her avid fans. Some of us commit to seeing every single film. Her body of work includes feature films, narrative and non-fiction, experimental film and video, and episodic television. She is a true artist devoted to her craft.

Walker has been an activist all of her adult life, and believes that learning to extend the range of our compassion is activity and work available to all. She is a staunch defender not only of human rights, but of the rights of all living beings. She is one of the world’s most prolific writers, yet continues to travel the world to literally stand on the side of the poor, and the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed. She also stands, however, on the side of the revolutionaries, teachers and leaders who seek change and transformation of the world. Upon returning from Gaza in 2008, Walker said, “Going to Gaza was our opportunity to remind the people of Gaza and ourselves that we belong to the same world: the world where grief is not only acknowledged, but shared; where we see injustice and call it by its name; where we see suffering and know the one who stands and sees is also harmed, but not nearly so much as the one who stands and sees and says and does nothing.”

MY BIG WHY

When I asked award-winning filmmaker Pratibha Parmar to identify just a few of the common threads running through her films over the past thirty years, she brought these two themes forward....making the invisible visible and celebrating the joy of difference.

The second is how her thinking and her art have been inspired by powerful poets, activists, and change-makers like Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Angela Davis. Her cinematic gaze on these women has in turn fostered deep friendships and nourishing kinship.

For her entire career, Pratibha has been in creative collaboration with her long-standing life and business partner, Producer Shaheen Haq. When I reflect on these motifs and think of what I know about her films, I have to smile warmly and nod yes in gratitude for what her films have brought into my life. Some of the films Pratibha has created, like A Place of Rage, Beauty in Truth, Warrior Marks, and My Name is Andrea, have literally changed my life. Each one of these films stands alone as a devotion to truth-telling. They show us what we haven’t been able to see before, with the kind of beauty that helps us to bear the unbearable hard truths, all the while inviting us to care more. To love more. To tell the truth more.

Her films invite us to open our eyes to the reality of suffering from an honest and deep heartfelt place. While Pratibha’s films have plenty of calls to action, there’s something else here to witness, and I want everyone I know to witness it. The thread, for me, is that she conveys gentleness within the harsh reality, this is her as the artist - a storyteller of the human experience - woven with compassion and truth. She honors the human spirit’s ability to find dignity in conditions of suffering while always holding abusive systems accountable. There is an invitation. I said yes to this invitation in my early twenties.

As I contemplate what her work has stirred for me, I feel myself responding to an invitation to a holistic consciousness that includes, provokes, and summons the parts of me that are most needed by a hurting world. When I think back to the night Warrior Marks opened in San Francisco’s Castro Theater in (1983), I can now see that the film had a before and after effect on my life. It is a documentary about female genital mutilation and features the Pulitzer Prize Award Winning author Alice Walker as the narrator. I had just moved out of San Francisco to the country to live with the Art Matriarch of our community, Sue Hoya Sellars. We were guests of Alice Walker’s, so we drove back into the city with excited anticipation for the film’s opening night. The intention is to bring light to (FGM) and to be with and explore the centuries-old ritualistic custom of female genital mutilation still being practiced throughout many parts of the world. A profound sense of devastation washed over me as I viewed the film, seeped in the richness of color, texture, and a sense of place. I quite literally felt that I was becoming a different person as I watched this transformative film. I woke up the next day, changed, and called to action. This movie and the women who were a part of making it happen have shaped my work with Intentional Creativity.

I have many stories I could tell of my personal encounter with Warrior Marks, but suffice it to say that this documentary sparked a vision that took hold and provoked me to take a stand for the change I wanted to see. This film turned out to be a seminal catalyst in my life.

Shortly thereafter, Intentional Creativity presented itself to me through the teachings of my mentor, Sue Hoya Sellars. If you’re in my community, you’ll know the story of how this was the moment when I was wedging the clay, and Sue asked me what the change was that I wanted to see in the world.

My response was, “to see the end of violence against women and children.” Sue instructed me to put that loving intention into the clay and to believe it was going out to the women. I felt love travel from me to every place I could imagine, including the women that Pratibha documented in this film.

This is why the opportunity to share films like Warrior Marks with all of you is a very personally meaningful project. I think of it as a retrospective of some of her most powerful pieces and the visual archive of her unfolding evolution as an artist. We have had conversations about the Intentional Creativity that went into the making of these films and how they have shaped her life, as well as sowed the seeds for future projects. We are now bringing together a series of films to share with all of you.

We are overjoyed to collaborate with the Sonoma International Film Festival to create a cinema event that centers on women and honors Pratibha’s work. It is my deepest desire that having the opportunity to witness these films inside of a defined container in the order in which they were created will be as life-changing for you as they continue to be for me.

Engaging with our unique festival will be soul-stirring, eye-opening, and action-packed. We look forward to being in deep, heart-centered, and intentional conversation with you. Above all this gathering is about friendship and the stories that friendship, over time, tells about what matters to us. The stories we tell, the lives we touch, the justice we seek, this is our life.

"I have worked with Shiloh Sophia since 2010. Over the last 13 years, Shiloh has made it clear that she stands in the gap with women of color, and has given us a platform where our voices can be heard.

As the first appointed Executive Director of the MUSEA Intentional Creativity Foundation, and a Black woman, I am living proof of Shiloh's work to uplift Black and Brown women. The Living Your Truth and Daylong Arts of Justice Intentional Creativity class speaks volumes of Shiloh and MUSEA's clear intention to take action and not simply sit on the sidelines saying "let's do something."

I am honored to be working with MUSEA in a leadership role where my voice and my actions are making an impact and keeping the spotlight on the racial injustice that Black and Brown women face daily.

THREE POWERFUL FILMS WILL BE A PART OF OUR EXPERIENCE

from Filmmaker
Pratibha Parmar + KALI Films

Warrior Marks

A Place of Rage

Beauty in Truth

THREE POWERFUL FILMS WILL BE A PART OF OUR EXPERIENCE

from Filmmaker Pratibha Parmar + KALI Films

Warrior Marks

A Place of Rage

Beauty in Truth

from Filmmaker
Pratibha Parmar + KALI Films