Culture House is a Black, Brown, women owned film, TV and narrative immersive experiences company working at the intersection of pop culture and politics. Founded by Carri Twigg, Raeshem Nijhon and Nicole Galovski in 2018, Culture House is the company behind premium series like Growing Up for Disney+, Ladies First: A story of women in Hip Hop for Netflix, The Hair Tales for Hulu and the newly released hit, Black Twitter.

Culture House has produced film and television as well as brand driven stories that speak to the deep and complex experiences that shape and define our lives and our futures. In the last 3 years, Culture House has paid over $11 million to BIPOC and women collaborators…and we are just getting started.

Jamarah Amani, LM is a community midwife who believes in the transformative and healing power of birth and that every baby has a human right to human milk. Her mission is to do her part to build a movement for Birth Justice locally, nationally and globally. Jamarah is the architect of the Birth Justice framework, the Black Midwives Model of Care and the Birth Justice Bill of Rights.

Jamarah identifies as Black, Femme and Queer. A community organizer from the age of sixteen, Jamarah has worked with several organizations across the United States, the Caribbean and in Africa on various public health issues, including HIV prevention, infant mortality risk reduction, access to emergency contraception and access to midwifery care. As a birth worker and activist, Jamarah has been tackling issues of racial justice, including the epidemics of Black maternal and infant morbidity/mortality for over fifteen years. She is currently the Executive Director of Southern Birth Justice Network, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization working to expand the Birth Justice movement and to make midwifery and doula care accessible to marginalized communities. She is also the co-founder of National Black Midwives Alliance, the only national professional association in the U.S. specifically for midwives of African descent, and a founding member of the Queer and Transgender Midwives Association.

Jamarah is the recipient of the 2019 Trailblazer Award from the City of Miami, which proclaimed a day in her honor- Jamarah Amani Day, celebrated annually on March 14. She has been featured in a variety of media outlets including PBS, NPR, NBC and publications such as Vox, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Washington Post, among others. She has written for news outlets including the Miami Times and Miami Herald. Jamarah recently received the inaugural Umm Salaamah Sondra AbdullahZaimah Birthworker Award from Black Mamas Matter Alliance. In addition to parenting four children and watching the sunrise whenever possible, Jamarah offers midwifery care to families in South Florida and teaches workshops on Birth Justice to organizations across the United States.

Jamarah is currently producing a documentary entitled Legacy Power Voice: Movements in Black Midwifery with her partner, filmmaker Karyl-Lyn Sanderson

Rhiannon Carnes’ drive to make change and create brave spaces to build community runs deep. As the daughter of a lifelong artist, writer, and advocate—Faye Childs—Rhiannon knew from a young age that if you want to see real change happen, you have to get to work. This philosophy led her mom to eventually become a leader in Black publishing and the founder of BlackBoard, an organization that uplifted Black authors in a publishing landscape characterized by gross underrepresentation of BIPOC communities.

In 2016, Rhiannon became increasingly outraged as the presidential race played out. The same racism and sexism she had experienced throughout her life were playing out on the national stage—eventually leading to the election result that meant America could no longer pretend white supremacy was a thing of the past. As a Black single mother, survivor of gun violence, and military veteran, she could not be silent as extremist conservatives tried to chip away at the freedom, dignity, and humanity of BIPOC communities, especially Black women. Rhiannon turned to her mother for guidance and wisdom, who encouraged her to get to work.

A few days after the election, Rhiannon found the Women’s March via Facebook; the organizers sought someone to lead Ohio’s march in January 2017. With a corporate and healthcare background, Rhiannon did not have experience with community organizing, but she said yes anyway. “There are not too many Black women or women of color in this new feminist movement. I knew this was a movement where all women had to come together. I finally felt that women of color could have a voice and be leaders in this movement, so I took it as an opportunity to use my voice.”

And so Rhiannon became the founder and leader of Ohio’s Women’s March. After many long hours collaborating with national leaders and recruiting over 100 volunteers, on January 21, 2017, over 15,000 women, gender-expansive folks, and allies took the Ohio streets with Rhiannon leading the way to the Statehouse. After the success of the Women’s March, she became a field organizer with Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio, where she worked for two years before beginning to work with Erin Scott to co-found Ohio Women’s Alliance.

In 2019, Rhiannon and Erin began meeting over coffee to share their hopes for an Ohio that prioritizes the well-being, prosperity, and liberation of BIPOC women and gender-expansive folks, especially Black women. They envisioned a year-round organizing group that centers grassroots leaders in Ohio. To get started, they set out on a state-wide listening tour to identify the issues that impact our constituents the most, the challenges we face, and the hopes and priorities we have for the future of our communities. The tour led to our Pillars of Prosperity—the values platform that laid the foundation for the official launch of Ohio Women’s Alliance in late 2019 and the OWA Action Fund in 2020.

Since then, Rhiannon’s accomplishments have been celebrated in Elle, The Nation, Harper’s BAZAAR, and Cosmopolitan, and she was named a Reproductive Justice Hero and a 2022 Jane Bagley Lehman Award winner by the Tides’ Foundation.

Ohio Women’s Alliance was the only Black-led founding organization of Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights—the coalition that led the campaign to pass Ohio’s Reproductive Freedom Amendment in November 2023. As a member of the Executive Committee, from the beginning, Rhiannon advocated to ensure that Black communities were prioritized in the amendment language and in the campaign’s voter education and GOTV strategies. OWA was instrumental in moving the campaign beyond using stigmatizing language, and to center abortion and abortion storytellers instead.

The only abortion storytellers who worked full-time on the campaign were OWA Staff members, and Rhiannon and her team crafted the messaging for Black voters and led the only BIPOC-focused field program. OWA’s 40 canvassers made over 1.3 million calls, sent over 150,000 texts, and knocked on nearly 19,000 doors. Exit polling published by The Washington Post shows that voter turnout among the groups we contacted was historic. And, despite being the smallest and youngest organization involved with the campaign, OWA ran the largest field program, giving Ohio the push necessary to secure the historic win, with 57% of Ohioans voting to pass the Amendment.

“Leading a 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 that both share the value of Black liberation allows us to bring together the perfect formula for change-making: communal care, leadership development, youth empowerment, and advocacy. What brought me to the movement was my own trauma and pain, but what kept me in the movement was community and uplifting women who did not have the same opportunities as me,” Rhiannon says about becoming a leader of Reproductive Justice work in Ohio. “This work is hard. We get tired and burned out from fighting every day for our rights. OWA and the OWA Action Fund are supportive spaces where we can heal and help each other as we keep fighting.”

Lateefah Simon has spent her career fighting for justice — fighting for folks without a voice. Now, as a 25-year veteran organizer and nationally recognized advocate for civil rights and social justice, she’s running to take this fight to congress. Lateefah began her career in advocacy at age 16 as an outreach coordinator for the Young Women’s Freedom Center. At age 18, she gave birth to her eldest daughter, Aminah, and quickly learned as a young single mother that the government wasn’t working for people like her. A year later, she became Executive Director of YWFC and spent the next decade earning national acclaim for her advocacy on behalf of marginalized young women. In recognition of that work Lateefah won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and at age 26 she became the youngest woman to receive this prestigious award. She was tapped by then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris to lead the creation of Back on Track — a highly effective, first-of-its-kind anti-recidivism initiative for young adults charged with low-level offenses.

In 2016, galvanized by the death of Oscar Grant, Lateefah ran and was elected to the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board of Directors. Born legally blind, Lateefah relies solely on public transportation to go about her day and sought to make BART more affordable for working families and transit-dependent people like herself.

Lateefah continues to be a leading voice in Oakland and the Bay Area serving a multitude of local organizations and frequently offering state officials strategic advice on policy matters related to racial justice. Now, Lateefah is committed to bringing her community’s voice to Washington.

“I’ve spent my life fighting for folks without a voice. I will take the shared stories and experiences of this community to the halls of Congress so I can continue our fight. That’s how we make change. And that’s why I’m running for this seat.”

In Lateefah, CA-12 has a fighter. To learn more, visit www.lateefahsimon.com

Sophia Madrigal is an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and is of Turtle Mountain Chippewa descent. An avid writer and actress, she is a sophomore at Harvard College studying Psychology and English. Sophia graduated from Orange County School of the Arts in 2022, where she resided within the El-Erian Acting Conservatory. Sophia is a recipient of the Yale University Misty Upham Award for Young Native Actors 2023, and is the Orange County Artist of the Year Theater finalist 2022. Sophia Madrigal is the founder and co-director of the Luke Madrigal Indigenous Storytelling Nonprofit, and currently serves as a California Native Youth Gen-I Ambassador. Under the nonprofit she has performed in the original Cahuilla play Menil and Her Heart, in over 20 different venues including for the California State Legislature in 2022. The play and production of Wildflower: Indigenous Spirit earned Sophia her Inaugural GSUSA Gold Award and Take Action Award. For her work, Sophia spoke at the United Nations’ Day of the Girl Summit: Girls Speak Out Event in 2020. The original play Wildflower also earned Sophia her Rupert Costo Medal in American Indian Affairs from the 2022 UCR Writers Week

For well over a decade, Danielle Moodie has been a bold and unapologetic voice for justice. Known for her no-holds-barred commentary, she is a sought after voice in the cable news and the social mediaspheres. Danielle’s discourse has been sought after since her viral 2016 election night CBC News appearance where she referred to the election of Donald Trump as “white supremacy’s last stand”. As Danielle seeks to navigate our ever-changing global landscape and imagine new worlds, her voice and message have begun to shift from righteous rage to expansionism and love. This new paradigm serves as a form of resistance and a broader platform to provoke new kinds of thinking. This is one of the many themes that she will be exploring in her forthcoming book, which is currently in development. Over the last several years Danielle has increased her media footprint with three podcasts, reaching500k listeners; her flagship series iHeart Media’s #WokeAFDaily; The Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal that she co-hosts with fellow journalist Andy Levy and #democracyish which she co-hostsss weekly with fellow Daily Beast columnist and author Wajahat Ali. She also writes for a myriad of outlets including: The DailyBeast, Zora at Medium, Vogue, Essence, and others.

Variety Magazine describes Angela Yee as “one of media’s best-known multi-hyphenates.” True to form, the Radio Hall of Fame and 3x Gracie Award-winning media personality co-hosted the popular nationally syndicated radio show, The Breakfast Club for 12 years, hosts her own Lip Service podcast, just launched her own nationally syndicated radio show on IHeart Media, ‘Way Up With Angela Yee,’ owns several businesses, is a philanthropist and community leader…and she’s just getting started. Last year, Angela bet on herself and left the success and security of The Breakfast Club to officially launch “Way Up with Angela Yee.” Transitioning to positions behind the scenes, Angela also created and executive produced her own Facebook series, “Mastery of Comedy,” which paired veteran comics AidaRodriguez, Donnell Rawlings, Karlous Miller, and Roy Wood Jr. with up-and-coming comics for mentorship and exposure. Yee then executive produced the VH1 docuseries “My True Scam Story” detailing how Jennifer Williams from Basketball Wives was scammed out of her Range Rover from an ex-boyfriend, simultaneously giving his other victims a platform to tell their stories. As her media persona continues to rise, Angela’s entrepreneurial spirit kicked in. Her ventures include a coffee company Coffee Uplifts People (C.U.P.) with a brick-and-mortar location in Bed Stuy and distribution at Target, Whole Foods, and in select restaurants and all Chelsea Piers Locations, and the TheNourish Spot BK juice bar in Bed Stuy. Yee has invested in Detroit with the launch of her own hair shopPrivate Label and the recent purchase of a 30-unit building in Midtown. Her real estate portfolio includes multiple investment properties in Brooklyn, Detroit, Miami, and a short-term luxury rental in the Catskills in Upstate NY. Not only has Yee invested in real estate, but she is also a licensed agent at Serhantwho is determined to help others establish their legacy. In 2018, the New York City mayor officially designated August 28th as Angela Yee Day. Angela has her finger on the pulse of hip-hop, culture, and business. She is indeed a multi-hyphenate in every sense, and her two-decade career has solidified her as this generation’s Renaissance woman

Professor Melissa Harris-Perry is the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University. She is the author of the award-winning Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, and Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Professor Harris-Perry is the founder and president of the Anna Julia Cooper Center whose mission is to advance justice through intersectional scholarship and action.

She served as the final host and managing editor of The Takeaway, a daily, national public radio program and podcast which aired on over 300 public radio stations across the country. From 2012-2016, she hosted the groundbreaking television show “Melissa Harris-Perry” on weekend mornings on MSNBC and was awarded the Hillman Prize for broadcast journalism. She served as editor-at-large for Elle.com and continues to serve as a contributing editor for The Nation.

Ari Afsar(she/her) is a Bangladeshi-American mixed-race singer, songwriter, and storyteller who believes in the power of art changing culture, and culture changing policy. A graduate of ethnomusicology from UCLA, Afsar recently released her album, We Won’t Sleep distributed by Sony Masterworks. She is the composer of Broadway-bound Jeannette, as named by Playbill. Her musical work has been commissioned by and featured at the La Jolla Playhouse(Allegory&Teacher Of The Year), NMTC @ O’Neill, Warren Miller Performing Arts Center(Keep Your Head Down), McCarter Theatre(I & You), University of Tennessee Knoxville(Teacher Of The Year), University of Missoula(Jeannette), Loyola Marymount University(Jeannette), Cooper Union(Letters To The President), Signature Theatre(Jeannette)andTexas State University(Jeannette). Afsar has opened for Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, Raphael Warnock, Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Misty Copeland, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Kwan, Ani DiFranco and Cory Booker. Her credits include starring in the top 10 Netflix original movie Wedding Season, co-composing a song with Pasek & Paul for Shawn Mendez in Sony’sLyleLyle Crocodile, originating Eliza in Chicago’sHamilton, starring in the world premiere of Bhangra National La Jolla Playhouse, winning Miss California 2010, placing top 10 at Miss America2011, winning the Lyricist Award at The O’Neill NMTC 2018, and placing top 36 on American idol. She is the co-founder of Until We Do It which provided 1 Million masks to communities disproportionately affected by Covid-19 in 2021 and she is currently an MPA candidate at NYUWagner.

Mary was introduced to the art of turntables and mixing by her older brother while he practiced daily in the basement of their family’s Rosedale, Queens home. Barely a teen, yet highly intrigued by the techniques of the many notable DJ’s of that era, Mary began working diligently to hone and perfect her skills to also become a talented disc jockey. With a combination of natural talent, passion and cultural music influences from her Haitian background, this would quickly lead to Mary Mac becoming a highly sought-after female DJ.

Mary Mac’s introduction to the entertainment industry started when she was approached by a Def Jam A&R Executive while deejaying a NYC loft party. She was asked to DJ for their newest hip-hop artist at the time, a Midwest gangsta rapper by the name of Boss. This gig soon led to her involvement in the nationwide Phat Jam Tour of 1992, which featured Def Jam hip-hop recording artists Run DMC, Redman and Onyx. DJ Mary Mac and Boss opened for each show across the entire span of this several month tour. By the mid 90’s, Mac’s recognition as a DJ became well-established, leading to invaluable opportunities key to her growth as an artist of the turntables. Mary was continuously booked as the resident DJ for various national events and celebrity parties ever since this first opportunity to spin on a bigger platform.

Over the course of time, Mary Mac continued to make quite the name for herself. In the beginning, she was booked as a DJ for the celebrity birthday parties of the legendary Whitney Houston, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte and Queen Pen; promotional release parties for Cassidy, Fatty Koo, Dead Prez, Hush Magazine, Monica, Clipse and Kimora Lee Simmons’ launch party for the “Beautiful” fragrance; events hosted by Brooklyn Museum, Miss Jones, Monie Love, DJ Kid Capri and America’s Top Model winner Eva Pigford. In addition, she’s played alongside recording artists such as Red Café of Def Jam West, Cheri Dennis of Bad Boy Records, Jimmy Cozier of J Records, Da Brat of So So Def, Black Buddafly and Teairra Marì of Def Jam and Robin Thicke of Interscope Records. Mary continued to impress the world with her talent by spinning special events such as the “Tribute to Luther Vandross” and Hot 97 Radio Station’s annual concert for non-profit organization Rockcorps.

DJ Mary Mac has spun with the likes of many other deejays such as Clue, Enuff, Funkmaster Flex, Jazzy Joyce, Mad Linx, Mister Cee, Spinderella, SNS and several other influential DJs in the industry. As of 2013, she has been well-known as the resident DJ for the iconic entertainer Madonna. Mac has rocked out as the headlining DJ for Madonna and Guy Oseary’s Oscar After Party as well as the Opening Act for Madonna’s Rebel Heart Tour, Prince and The Revolution; Stevie Wonder and Ashton Kutcher’s South By Southwest SXSW After Party. Of the many tours that Mary Mac has been included on, they started as far back as 2002 when she was also invited to the Grey Goose Tour featuring Lady May, Lil’ Jon, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and 8Ball w/ MJG. Today, she is the resident DJ for Mona Scott-Young of Monami Entertainment, Salesforce, Out Of Tune (Live Music Game Show App), Mayor Bill DeBlasio and Salesforce.

In 2013, Mary Mac was featured in the Huffington Post online article “23 Inspiring Women Who Are Blazing Trails for the LGBT Community” recognized for all of her accomplishments over the past 20 years. Nevertheless, Mary Mac remains humble and just wants the world to feel good through reflections of her sound and energy each and every time she spins.

Producer

Anna Hauptmann

Event Branding & Digital Design

DD.NYC

Video Team

Tanya Selvaratnam

Emily Geraghty

Scriptwriter

Wendy Shanker