Event Videos
6-27-25: Freedom From and Freedom To
This event was part of SJI’s free summer event series In Tandem: Solidarity, Solidarité, Solidaridad, curated by Lola Ayisha Ogbara, which explored themes of solidarity, collective work, and the process of building toward common goals through film, art, performance, workshops, and more.
Friday, June 27, 2025
6:00 – 8:00 PM
Chicago Justice Gallery
Freedom From and Freedom To is an acclaimed performance series organized by Cristal Sabbagh that brings musicians and dancers together to create a fully improvised set.
Dancers and musicians for each set are selected at random. Their task is to make use of the chance encounter to fuse their diverse artistic backgrounds in relation to one another, working out their next move and their next musical note by studying each other in the moment and by drawing on their own training and stylistic traditions. The resulting performance invites the audience to consider the ways in which the performers’ solidarity and collective world-building through movement and sound might relate to working together in other contexts.
Featuring:
Dancers
- Solomon Bowser – Solomon Bowser is a dancer and choreographer from the red clay hills of Stone Mountain, GA. He has been blessed to work with some beautiful folks and projects during his 14 years in Chicago. He is currently a thought partner and collaborator with J’Sun Howard. When he’s not dancing, Bowser serves his community through his work at See Chicago Dance.
- Ed Clemons – Chicago native Ed Clemons is a movement artist and DJ, inspired by the energy and freestyle movements of hip hop and house music dance culture.
- Kopano – Kopano is a Chicago-based cultural worker who communicates through sound and movement. Seeing theirself in the legacy of Pan-Africanism, Kopano strives to connect their South African and native-Chicagoan roots through musical production and collaboration.
- Mya – Mya McClellan (she/her) is a versatile artist based in Chicago and Ohio. She holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2021). Mya is an improviser, choreographer, and performer, currently touring with Ohio-based Abby Z and the New Utility.
- Sandy Perez – Sandy Perez is a dancer, choreographer, and freestyler located in the Chicagoland area with strong ties to chosen family in Nashville. Through play, she aims to embrace connection and world building as well as celebrate community and culture.
- Cristal Sabbagh – Cristal Sabbagh’s performance practice, rooted in improvisation and Butoh, walks a line between the everyday, the divine, the personal, and the political. In embodying in her art transformational memories while simultaneously celebrating pop culture and the experimental, she challenges power structures and awakens viewers’ senses. She is the creator and curator of Freedom From and Freedom To events that are improvisational performance environments which interrogate movement and sound.
- Sara Zalek – Sara Zalek is an interdisciplinary artist, avant-garde maker of situations and curious objects. Rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation, their work is intimate, raw, poetic.
Musicians
- Paige Brown – Vocalist, pianist and composer Paige Brown (she/her) believes in the use of voice as a channel, and the use of the instrument/body as a voice.
- Caroline Jesalva – Caroline Jesalva is a Chicago-based improviser, curator, and violinist-vocalist traversing the worlds of performance art, contemporary classical, songwriting, and experimental/improvised music.
- Allen Moore – Allen Moore is a Black American experimental turntablist, painter, educator/mentor born and raised in the South Side Village of Robbins, Illinois.
- Julian Otis – Julian Otis is a vocalist dedicated to the advancement of Black music in America, spanning genres from creative music and jazz, to contemporary classical.
- Julián Pujols Quall – Julián Pujols Quall is a Chicagoan that uses jazz, classical, free improv, electronic, and Caribbean influences to push artistic boundaries. Recently Julián co-founded the Peabody Improvisers Collective, held a three year long residency at the Jazz Showcase, and formed Mamey, a musical project that seeks to deepen the understanding of the influence of West African arts on the Americas.
- Nick Turner – Nick Turner is a Chicago based musician and social worker that utilizes music and sound creation as a vehicle for emotional experiencing and expression.
4-6-23: All Eyes on Haiti: Occupations, Migrations, and Reparations
As of this month, Haiti’s humanitarian and security crisis continues to worsen. There are calls for international support amidst mass kidnappings, continued violence and a hunger emergency. To better understand the current situation, watch All Eyes on Haiti: Occupations, Migrations, and Reparations hosted by the UIC Social Justice Initiative, EqualHealth. and the Haitian Bridge Alliance.
Scholars, medical experts, and immigration organizers were joined by activists currently living in Haiti. During the event, guest speakers shared their experiences and the ways that the current political, economic and health crises are impacting their communities.
Click HERE or below to watch All Eyes on Haiti and be sure to share the recording. You can also learn more about Haiti with our new Resource Guide.
4-12-23: Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective
The UIC Social Justice Initiative, Latin American and Latino Studies Department, and the Rafael Cintron Ortiz Latino Cultural Center, hosted Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective, a conversation with author Lorgia García Peña and SJI Director Barbara Ransby.
In her latest book, Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation—rather than solely a site of identity—through which we can understand both oppression and resistance.
9-24-21: Belonging Place Power Impossibilities
Virtual Opening of Exhibition, Belonging: Place, Power, (Im)Possibilities by the Social Justice Initiative (SJI) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Featuring: Photographer, Tonika Johnson Organizer, Taylore Norwood SJI Director, Barbara Ransby SJI Communications Director, Essence McDowell Details: This recording is the online exhibition opening of Belonging: Place, Power, and (Im)Possibilities, the inaugural exhibition at the Chicago Justice Gallery featuring the work of Tonika Lewis Johnson.
About the Exhibit: In a series of portraits and interviews, Johnson chronicles the ways in which young people have been made to feel they don’t belong in their own city (Chicago, IL). While Johnson’s portraits of young peoples’ experiences paint a grim picture of hierarchy, surveillance, entitlement and narrow mindedness, it is not a tale of defeat. Through their own creative agency, young people push back against the politics of racism, exclusion and containment by creating their own “free spaces” and organizations that contest the commons. Learn more at www.BelongingChicago.com or www.sji.uic.edu.
6-15-20: Police, Politics, Power and Race
Police, Politics, Power and Race is an online discussion hosted by UIC Social Justice Initiative (SJI) on June 15th. The event explores how the current movement for Black Lives has led to the defunding of police in certain cities, calls for massive investments and new economic models for community empowerment. Guest speakers shared knowledge and analyses of the racial and political implications for Chicago. The event concluded with a performance by singer-songwriter, Jamila Woods.
This video features: – SJI Director, Barbara Ransby – – SJI Associate Director, Essence McDowell – – Artist, Jamila Woods – – Organizer, Kristiana Colon – – Data expert, Trina Reynolds-Tyler – – Human rights lawyer, Renee Hatcher –