Great podcast about art and social activism.

I'm researching podcasts by and about visual artists, for an eventual project I am cooking up. I just found the Art and Healing Podcast, and listened to a FANTASTIC interview with the very inspiring and interesting Alli Chagi-Starr.

Alli Chagi-Starr is a dancer and founder of Art in Action Youth Leadership Training, Art and Media Director for Reclaim the Future at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, founder of Dancers Without Borders, Another World in Possible Road Shows, and the twelve-year-old Radical Performance Fest. Her essays have appeared in Democratizing the Global Economy, Global Uprising, Voices from the WTO, The Political Edge and How to Stop the Next War Now. Currently, Alli is working to complete her book, Movements for Mass Movements.

I'm really inspired by this podcast...Alli easily and clearly discusses the importance of  understanding your responsibility to your community as an artist, recognizing the significant role artists play in uplifting communities and making change, and also the importance of having a creative process of one's own, a solid practice of self-care and cultivation of one's own artist mind at the center of all social justice work. Its something that many, many people struggle with and her articulation of that struggle and of the importance of striking that balance is excellent.

Listen HERE.

The podcast itself is very simple and elegant, and the interviewer mostly stays out of Alli's way as she tells her story. I'm definitely using this as one of the models for my own podcast project. I'm thinking of interviewing primarily women artists about the ways they (we) figure out our careers, activism, families, money, creative process, you name it. For years and years I was a part of a women artists organization called No Limits for Women in the Arts and through that network met the most extraordinary and inspiring and truly groundbreaking women artists, and my podcasts will begin with many of them...checking in with where they are now, where art and life has taken them, why they have made the choices they have made, and how they think of the role of the artist in this place and time. Among other things.

p.s. I just found a great tutorial on starting your own podcast here.