Our Indigenous communities are no strangers to fighting for equity to achieve equality and the unions representing actors and writers striking at the same time, protesting low pay is no different.
Join ICT at the Allen Houser Art Park, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) for our Newsmaker Event with Jourdan Bennett-Begaye as she leads an interview exploring why the strike is happening, why it's important, and what they can do through an Indigenous lens.
Guests include author and professor of Indigenous Studies Liza Black and arts writer, curator, and author and writer DeLanna Studi. Advocating for the ability to tell our stories to our people is an inherent right that the Native American and Indigenous Writers Committee (NAIWC) and others from marginalized backgrounds have been on the frontlines making their voices heard.
Liza Black is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and an Assistant Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Her first book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960, looks at these films as a site of work, employment, and labor, documenting the hiring of Natives and non-Natives to play Native characters in the 1940s and 1950s. Her second book is a history of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and tentatively titled, How to Get Away with Murder.
DeLanna Studi (she/hers) is a Cherokee actor/playwright whose TV credits include Dreamkeeper, Edge of America, Shameless, General Hospital, Z Nation, Goliath, and Reservation Dogs. Her theater credits include the First National Broadway Tour of August: Osage County, Off-Broadway’s Informed Consent and Gloria: A Life. She retraced her family’s footsteps along the Trail of Tears with her father and wrote her play And So We Walked. She has created plays for Theatre for One, The Theatre Center, and Period Piece. She is the Chair of SAG-AFTRA’s National Native Americans Committee, and the Artistic Director of Native Voices at the Autry and a 2022 United States Artist Fellow.
Jourdan Bennett-Begaye is a Diné journalist currently stationed in the Nacotchtank and Piscataway Lands (Washington, D.C.) and is a member at Native American Journalists Association. Since her hire with ICT in 2018, Jourdan has reported stories on health, education, public health, 2020 Census, policy, politics, and more. She has focused on the COVID-19 pandemic coverage, especially COVID-19 data, in Indian Country. Jourdan received her master’s degree in magazine, newspaper and online journalism through the Newhouse Minorities Fellowship at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in New York.
