Special Events 2011

Mixed Unplugged:
Live Performance with Comedy, Music, Spoken Word, and Story
June 11, 2011 6:30PM
Co-Hosts: Victoria Platt Tilford & Terrell Tilford
Victoria Platt Tilford is an American film, television and stage actress who was most recently featured in Venice at the Kirk Douglas Theatre and in Pippin at the Mark Taper Forum.  She has held featured roles in the Bill Duke thriller, Cover, and was thrilled to play Josephine Baker in the HBO Original movie Winchell as well as Dexter Gordon’s daughter in ‘Round Midnight.  Platt was born in Queens, New York to an Afro-Caribbean mother and a Polish-American father.  Victoria has been best associated with roles on the daytime dramas Guiding Light and All My Children and has been seen in numerous television roles including Strong Medicine, Crossing Jordan, Barbershop and CSI: Miami.  Platt is married to actor Terrell Tilford and together they own and run Tilford Art Group, an art gallery devoted to promoting emerging artists. 

Terrell Tilford received his MFA in Theater from Rutgers University and a BA from the University of California at Berkeley.  He is best known for his recurring roles on Showtime’s Soul Food series, Enterprise as a mutated Klingon and for his recurring roles as Dr. Carrington in Days of our Lives and Detective David Grant in Guiding Light, and Dr. Greg Evans of One Life to Live. He is also a noted Art collector and artist himself.   He is currently working on two pilot TV shows.

Featured Mixed Unplugged Performers

Amy Hill’s television credits include Grey‘s Anatomy, Boston Legal, Desperate Housewives, Friends and Seinfeld.  She might best be remembered for her groundbreaking role as grandma in All American Girl with Margaret Cho now available on DVD.  She co-starred with Mike Myers in Cat in the Hat and with Adam Sandler in Fifty First Dates. Hill’s voice work includes King of the Hill, Lilo & Stitch, Jackie Chan Adventures, American Dad as well as on Nickelodeon’s new fall animated series Kung Fu Panda.  She will recur in a new HBO series, Enlightened with Laura Dern  premiering in January.

CP Chang received his M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia College of Chicago. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Hair Trigger, Artisan, Upstairs at Duroc, Atlanta Review, on Nerve.com, on wordriot.org, and in the anthologies My Angels and Demons at War, Open to Interpretation, and Chicago: An Immigrant City. He was an Associate Producer for Elephant Rock Productions, which produced a series of educational videos on the art and business of writing, and he is currently a company member of 2nd Story. A section of his novel-in-progress won the Patricia Painton Scholarship at the Paris Writers Workshop and an Honorable Mention of the Helen Fong Dare Scholarship at Columbia College.

Emmanuel Matt Egwu Born and raised in a suburb of Chicago, Emmanuel was constantly immersed in the music scene. His father, from Nigeria, owned an African night club for the majority of Emmanuel’s younger years. His mother, from Illinois, manages an West African high-life band to this day. Aside from those influences Emmanuel had a collective of close friends from different backgrounds and very contrasting cultures which shaped the person he is and the music he plays. His music varies vastly across genres and makes an attempt to mix the sounds of the world. He has recently been working on his acoustic  singing/song writing skills, which focus on the rock/reggae/hip hop genre.



Chanel Elizabeth Miller or Zhang Xiao Xia Is currently a freshman at UCSB majoring in literature, and is proud to say that all her life she has been learning how to swim in my multiracial gene pool.

Jason Luckett, Los Angeles based, in the past two years, has performed with classical Indian musicians in Kerala, toured the western United States to promote healthcare reform, been published in the groundbreaking literary anthology The Black Body,  and read as part of the prestigious ALOUD series at the Los Angeles Public Library and Sit ‘n Spin at the Comedy Central Stage.  He also contributed a solo theatrical piece to The Emmett Till Project at Highways Performance Space and twice featured at The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival in both his musical and literary capacities. Jason recorded his latest release, The Second Half of the Bet (Hope Again), as 2010 came to a close.  As wide-ranging as his activities of the past couple years, SHOTB moves organically through folk, jazz, rock and world rhythm influences, retaining the strong personality of what Jason irreverently calls “groovy acoustic soul.

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Linda Ravenswood (BFA, MA) has a new book, Hymnal, forthcoming from Mouthfeel Press in the Spring of 2011.  Her work ( literary and visual ) has appeared in many journals and magazines in the US and internationally ( most recently,  Poetry Magazine, Underground Stories, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVOX ) and as a featured writer on The No Impact Man Project.  Her music has appeared in several documentary films and on PBS.  Recently her installations were exhibited at The Jose Vera Gallery (Eagle Rock, 2011) and The Pico House Gallery (Downtown Los Angeles, 2010).  She has lived extensively in the US, Ireland and the UK.  She is presently in Los Angeles making art and pursuing her Ph.D.

Kimberlee Soo is an actor and writer published by INTHEFRAY, 2D Magazine, Cellstories and seventytwowords.com, who has read for Featherproof, TheDollarStoreShow, MCA’s Literary Gangs of Chicago and Victory Gardens’ SparkPlug. Favorite acting projects include the west coast premiere of Pacific Overtures (MTO, starring Mako); Words On Fire (Steppenwolf); Rebecca Gilman’s The Crime Of The Century (Circle Theatre); A Christmas Carol (Goodman Theatre); the original production of Eleven Rooms Of Proust, adapted/directed by Mary Zimmerman (About Face/Lookingglass) and the mid-west premiere of David Henry Hwang’s GOLDEN CHILD (Silk Road Theatre Project).

Jessica Young is a writer and adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago. She has a Performance Studies degree from Northwestern University and an MFA inFiction Writing from Columbia College. She has won awards for her fiction and nonfiction, and has been regularly featured on Chicago Public Radio’s Eight Forty Eight. Jessica is currently at work on a book project about race, gender, family and her upbringing in the black middle class. You can read her writing at www.ashy-knees.blogspot.com.

Khanisha Foster (See Organizers for bio)

 

2nd Story is a hybrid performance event combining storytelling, wine, and music that has been going strong for 10 years. A typical 2nd Story evening goes something like this: you hang out with your friends and eat and drink and make merry. Three to five times during the night, the lights go down, a spotlight comes up on somebody – maybe the person sitting next to you!- and they tell you a story. It’s a great time, and if we do our job right, you’ll leave telling your own stories. This year 2nd Story, which started in Chicago, is launching new series in Glasgow Scotland and Los Angeles. www.2ndstory.com