| Rhodessa
Jones is Co-Artistic Director of the acclaimed
San Francisco performance company, Cultural
Odyssey. She is an actress, teacher,
singer, and writer. Ms. Jones will premier
a new work based upon the plays of August
Wilson, funded by a theater grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts.
|
About Rhodessa Jones...
Performer, Founder and Director of The
Medea Project, Co-Director of Cultural
Odyssey
Rhodessa Jones is an actress, dancer,
singer, writer, teacher and Co-Artistic
Director of the San Francisco-based performance
company Cultural Odyssey. Ms. Jones is the
Founder and Director of The Medea Project:
Theater for Incarcerated Women, a performance
workshop designed to increase self-awareness
and self esteem in the incarcerated women's
population through the creation and production
of theater pieces based on their personal
histories. The Medea Project has presented
numerous productions, including Reality
Is Just Outside the Window at Theater
Artaud, Food Taboos in the Land of the
Dead and Buried Fire at the Lorraine
Hansberry Theater, A Place at the Table
at Center for the Arts and From Whores
to Matriarchs, Black Women Survivors on
the Edge at Luna Sea and Center for
African and African American Art and Culture
in San Francisco. The Medea Project has
received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation
to workshop and stage its forthcoming production
for which Ms. Jones will go into the San
Francisco County Jail to work with inmates
to develop a piece tentatively entitled
Slouching Toward Armageddon: A Captive's
Conversation on Race.
In 1998 she performed the title role in
My Castle's Rockin' the Alberta Hunter Story
at Theatre Rhinoceros. That same year she
was a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research
Institute in Los Angeles. She has been an
artist-residence at Glide Memorial Church
in San Francisco where she conceived and
directed Requiem for a Dead Love,
which addresses the issues of domestic violence.
In 1995 she was invited for an Artistic
Residency at Yale School of Drama, where
she directed Master's Degree classes in
New Performance for multi-cultural students.
Ms. Jones has created a film for MTV's
Rock the Vote and has worked with the Harris
County Juvenile Probation and Diverse Works
Performance Gallery in Houston, Texas. She
has produced and performed productions throughout
the United States and abroad and in 1993
she received a Bessie Award for her one
woman show Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed
Women. She has performed and collaborated
with her brother, dancer/choreographer Bill
T. Jones and Cultural Odyssey Co-Director
Idris Ackmoor on Perfect Courage,
which received a 1991 "Izzie"
award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance.
Since 1993 she has been a guest teacher
at New College in San Francisco and she
is presently an Artist-in-Residence for
the Prison Services in San Francisco where
she teaches theater to inmates.
For more information:
http://www.culturalodyssey.org/v2/aboutus/rhodessa_bio.html
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