Hanifah Walidah. Musician, Filmmaker, Playwright and Open Source Advocate​

Hanifah Walidah is a musician, playwright, educator and social arts activist. She currently is touring internationally as lead singer-songwriter for electro-soul band St.Lô. Her rich, twenty-year career has taken an ethnographic approach to the arts to create culturally relevant film, music, and stage works that help foster social change. Recent projects include the feature length award winning rocumentary U People and the nationally noted Black Folks’ Guide to Black Folks, a one-woman show and feature-length film imagining and stimulating conversations among queer and straight communities of color in the contemporary U.S. She is a founding member of the well-known New York City women of color theatre cabaret, Rivers of Honey.

















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MUSIC ​

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St.Lô
Hanifah Walidah is currently in the studio with her newest electro-soul band St. Lô, a musical collaboration between herself and French collective La Magnetique. After performing with St. Lo at the famed 2012 TransMusicales Festival, St.Lô was declared The TransMusicales Revelation by Le Monde. This title is bestowed on a band considered both musically innovative and culturally significant. They share this honor with previous honorees, Nirvana, Bjork, Massive Attack, Lenny Kravits, Portishead among others. Their performance at TransMusicales was streamed live on French television channel Arte’s website and is currently one the most watched videos on the site. St.Lô’ debut album and tour will commence in Fall 2013.



Hanifah Walidah first debuted as hip hop artist Sha-Key whose 1994 album A Headnadda’s Journey to Adidi-Skizm was released on Imago/BMG to acclaimed reviews from both publications and peers.  She also was co-founder of the poet/performance collectives The Vibe Khamelons and The Boom Poetic in the early nineties, both of which are recognized as groundbreaking in their fusion of hip-hop lyric structure and performance with traditional beatnik cadence and poetry. Hanifah’s innovative work with hip-hop and poetry influenced other known poets such as Saul Williams and Tony-award winner Sarah Jones.

“The first time I saw her on stage at the Nuyorican Poets Café I completely changed the way I wrote and performed” - Saul Williams.

She has been a writer, producer and lead vocalist for funk, soul reggae band the Brooklyn Funk Essentials since 1995 and with them recorded several albums and toured extensively throughout the globe.  She recorded singles Not Every Angel and Pick It Up from French producer Alex Kid’s LP’s Beinvenida and Mint. She has recorded and co-wrote with Grammy-award winning German producer Mousse T and super electronica group The Crystal Method. In 2000, she collaborated with Saul Williams, Mums the Schemer (HBO’s OZ) and the music of Earl Blaize (Antipop Consortium) and produced a hip-hop opera Adidi-The Untold Story, the only one at the time of its genre.

THEATER ​



“She is a mischievous mix media millennium whip. Hanifah Walidah speaks about black people and the gay community with a passion we associate with Zora Neale Hurston and Amira Baraka” –Ntozake Shange (Author- for colored girls who have considered Suicide when the Rainbow is enough)​​​​​

In 1997, she co-wrote and performed in the ensemble play Bloom which featured an entire cast and crew of women of color and explored race, class and gender within the fictitious political world of garden. While writing Bloom she co-founded Rivers of Honey, a workshop performance space for women of color, which is still being produced at WOW Café Theater in NYC. She received the NYFA Fellow for Poetry in 1999. In 2002 she wrote and debuted her one-woman show Black Folks Guide to Blacks funded in part by the Zellerbach Foundation and the Queer Cultural Center in San Francisco. Its initial run was heralded by the SF Chronicle, the SF Guardian and later by the Boston Globe, which reviewed its production at Harvard University in 2004.
 

“More over Anna Deveare Smith – there’s a new queen of Solo performance in town…” (Boston Globe) ​

“A gap tooth Zora Neale Hurston” (SF Guardian) ​

“A comedic tour de force…” (SF Chronicle) .​

Hanifah is currently developing the historically informed, magic realist piece Missing,  and a biographical musical theatre piece entitled My Life on the Mic.

FILM

Hanifah Walidah began her film career from a labor of love and producing a multitude of documentary, experimental and narrative film shorts. She directed and edited a 3-minute short True Grits within a 24-hour period as part of the NYC Midnight Run where it placed Best Of.  She curated a travel web series Black Girl In…  and later the U People online video series, The U People Experience, that highlighted a commonality of race, political and gender-based alienation across backgrounds. She also co-wrote White Lies Black Sheep from James Spooner, filmmaker of the internationally awarded documentary Afropunk.
 

U People
U People (2006) is an incidental documentary exploring issues of ethnicity, gender identification, family, arts and activism in contemporary black queer women’s communities. The first ‘rockumentary’ of its kind, U People brings viewers behind the scenes of a not-so-typical music video shoot for out black lesbian artist Hanifah Walidah’s single “Make A Move,” which debuted on LOGO’s Click List in January of 2007. Directed by Walidah and Olive Demetrius, the film was made from the 20 hours of downtime footage consisting of an unprecedented cast and crew of thirty queer women, straight women and transpeople of color between the ages of AGE and AGE, living in New York City. What the camera caught introduces hilarious, heartbreaking, candid and very human voices of young queer women of color into discussions of gender, race and humanity.

Regularly aired on MTV’s LOGO network since its debut, U People became the first LGBT film to be screened at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN in October of 2009, creating a much needed bridge between the gay rights movement and its relationship with the larger black-American populace. Since then, it has become a cultural movement, impacting the lives of black queer women, women of color, LGBT people, and many others across the globe. It has won several international festival awards, including the Jury Award for Best Documentary in the 2008 Image Nation Film Festival, the Audience Choice Award in the 2009 Paris De Les Femenists Film Festival in Paris, and a Most Outstanding Documentary nomination in the 2010 GLAAD Media Awards.

TEACHING ARTIST​

Hanifah Walidah is a teaching artist of hip hop, poetry, lyric interpretation. She has taught grades middle school to college in Oakland, New York City, Lorient and Rennes, France.  Her recent collaboration with artist organization Musiques d’Aujourd’hui en Pays de Lorient (MAPL), has utilized her music with St.Lô to teach youth English, with an particular attention to nuance through cultural exchange.



SOCIAL MEDIA​

Hanifah Walidah has been recognized by Vibe Magazine as having created the first online hip hop magazine Guillotine (strictly for the heads) to have appeared on the web in 1993. She currently curates a social media, tech blog Rule 4081 that advocates for independent artist in the expanding online based music industry.