Sparks!

Jaime Cepero (they/he) is an Afrolatino queer nonbinary actor, writer, and award-winning activist, most well known for playing the conniving Ellis Boyd in NBC’s musical drama cult favorite SMASH from executive producer Steven Spielberg. Other select credits include, on TV: Connecting… (NBC), Mess (HereTV/Amazon); on film: Daddy, Dating My Mother, Jess, I Am Michael, The Game Plan; in theater: Porgy & Bess (75th Anniversary National Tour), Night Of The Living Dead: The Musical! (Off-Broadway & cast recording), Excorcistic: The Musical (Off-Broadway), Hair (Claude; Dallas Theater Center), Godspell (Judas; ACT Connecticut), Jesus Christ Superstar: Gospel! (Simon; Alliance Theater), and Choir Boy (u/s Pharrus/David; Geffen Playhouse).

As a writer, Cepero is an alum of the Write It Out! Playwriting Program at National Queer Theater and the Devised Theater Working Group artist residency at The Public Theater. Their songwriting has been featured in The Musicals of Tomorrow on Broadway Podcast Network, the Times Square City Songwriting Competition (2x Semi Finalist), and the New York Theater Barn Choreography Lab at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Cepero’s organizing and community engagement work on the 2020 March On Broadway won two Gold Anthem Awards from the Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Follow on Instagram: @Papimagic, @francoisandtherebels

John-Michael Lyles is a New York–based, Texas-raised, multi-hyphenate creative. As an Obie-winning actor, he recently achieved his Broadway debut in the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning musical A Strange Loop. At NYC’s Barrow Street, he performed in the Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Flick and played Tobias in the critically acclaimed Sweeney Todd. The New York Times lauded his “hauntingly simple performance” in the NY City Center Encores production of 1776. He’s also been seen Off-Broadway in This Ain’t No Disco, Big River, Brooklynite, and Jasper In Deadland. His film debut was alongside Alec Baldwin in Blind, and he’s guest starred in The Other Two, Chicago PD, and NCIS: New Orleans. Regionally, he played Dickon in CTG’s The Secret Garden, originated the role of Toby in Bliss at the 5th Avenue, co-starred in Second City’s production of The Art of Falling, and was deemed a “fleet and winning phenom on stage” in the Guthrie’s Choir Boy. As a Vivace Award–winning composer/lyricist/librettist, he’s been commissioned by 5th Avenue Theater’s Raise Your Voice program, and he’s currently co-writing a new musical, Shoot for the Moon, with prestigious support from Rhinebeck Writer’s Retreat, MTF Makers Cohort 2, and Dramatist Guild Fellows Class of ’21. He also wrote additional music for Second Stage’s We’re Gonna Die Follow: john-michaellyles.com, @johnmichael_lyles

Sean M. Starowitz has worked in a variety of community-based contexts, spanning more than a decade of socially engaged art practice. He uses archival research and public memory as material to reframe our current understanding of natural history and political imaginaries.

Starowitz served as the assistant director of the arts for the City of Bloomington, Indiana. During this time, he directed the 1% for the Arts program and managed cultural grants on behalf of the city. Prior to his work in local government, he was the artist-in-residence at the Farm To Market Bread Company in Kansas City and is a graduate of the Interdisciplinary Arts program at the Kansas City Art Institute.

In 2023, Starowitz received his MFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. He currently lives and works in Philadelphia and spends his summers teaching at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts in Lexington, Kentucky.

Jillian Walker :: Gogo Yema is a multidimensional artist (composer, playwright, performer, vocalist, dramaturg), diviner, healer, teacher, and Sangoma Priestess. She is a guide of Ancestral healing, spirituality and creative consciousness through multiple dimensions, back and forward generationally across timelines, bloodlines, and legacy. With her spiritual practice as the central portal, she has created and supported over a decade of art in the fields of theater and performance, music, film, television, as well as throughout the academy, in healing spaces, women’s circles, prisons, places of worship, and sacred spaces at and across the oceans.

She blesses the honor of her lineages through performance and practice. Her most acclaimed work, SKiNFoLK: An American Show (The Bushwick Starr/National Black Theatre: NY Times Critics Pick, Kilroys List, Lilly Award) is published by 53rd State Press. Her other plays and projects have received numerous honors and include Songs of Speculation (JACK, 2020: Third Coast Audio Unbound Award) and Sarah’s Salt. (Winner Columbia@Roundabout, Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist, Relentless Award honorable mention). Her latest onstage script(ure), The Whitney Album, appeared in Soho Rep’s ’22 – ’23 season. One of Gogo’s favorite descriptions of her onstage work comes from poet and prophet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who described her Joe’s Pub concert Blue Ink as “Transformational, Black feminist, ancestral-portal-opening, love-centered musical work.”

With her multifaceted training and education in traditional academic spaces (BA: The University of Michigan; MFA: Columbia University) and ancient Afro-indigenous traditions (Chief teachers, Makhosi Himi Gogo Thule Ngane, Queen Baba Solstice Kha Ekhaya Esima, Makhosi Foundation), Jillian :: Gogo holds a unique combination of intellectual curiosity, spiritual rigor, and an incredible capacity for deep listening and collaboration with people, built and natural worlds, time/space, Ancestors, and all of the unseen.

Some of Gogo’s favorite collaborations include: writing/performing and serving as process director with The TEAM (Reconstructing), creating Move, Meditate, Make with Libby King, holding prompt-based performance classes with the students at The University of Washington and Harvard, holding circle with the women in Nisha Moodley’s Soul of Leadership, and sitting in prayer, song, and healing space with her spiritual family at the Makhosi Foundation.

BLK GRK (or, hiding in plain sight), a multiversal, poetic film exploration of the history of Black Greek letter organizations, is a deep upcoming collaboration with co-conceivers Rachel Chavkin and Eric Berryman and has expanded Jillian into its screenwriter, composer, and star, alongside Eric Berryman. Gogo is also deepening in collaboration with fellow artists, culture-shifters, and devoted leaders as the founding artist and studio mother of her own sacred healing house, Legasea, opening its doors in the fall of 2023.

From a heartspace that flows out of The Love of the Ancestors, she continues to incite and inspire sublime new forms of art, structures, and communal systems that break the brutal boundaries of the colonial imagination.