Team
TERRY MARSHALL
Terry Marshall (he/him), Founder & Executive Creative Director.
Terry is an artist, writer, cultural innovator, creative strategist and cultural studies scholar living in Brooklyn by way of Barbados and Boston. He has 25 plus years of experience as a labor and cultural organizer and previously founded the Hip Hop Media Lab and Streets is Watching. His work focuses on the intersection of social movement history and theory, transformative experience design, social scenes and the role of parties and festivals as drivers of social and cultural change. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab Civic Media Fellowship and an alumni of the Laundromat Project Creative Change Fellowship. He was a member of the design team of the Constellations Fund.
He is the author of Affective Underground, a chapter in the newly released anthology We Are Civic Media. Terry loves movies and comics and is a #WalkingDead superfan.
aISHA ‘ISH’ SHILLINGFORD
Artistic Director.
Aisha ‘Ish’ Al-Hurra) (she/her), is an artist, poet, and world builder, originally from Trinidad & Tobago. She creates large-scale collages, dreamscapes, poetic manifestos, and dream spaces cultivating collective visions of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. She creates complex story worlds and guides imagination and day dreaming experiences.
Her highly saturated collage, text-based work, installation and experiential art work conjure speculative Black utopias and maroon spaces inspired by her childhood in Trinidad, historical Afro-diasporic liberation movements, African spiritual traditions, and by the bold visions shared by Black folks everywhere. Using found, discarded and archival materials and encoded symbols and iconography, Aisha draws on themes of fugitivity, opacity, African indigeneity; African communalism, and sovereignty, to question the status quo and envision new political and conceptual possibilities. She explores how these new desired worlds can be constructed from the detritus of the old one. Her research work investigates the methodologies of Black imagination, liberation and visual communication & aesthetics. Her work embodies the ways in which radical imagination can give new meaning and new uses to the ephemera of systems that no longer serve us.
She is a former Fellow and Artist In Residence (Create Change Fellow ‘20 and AiR ‘23) at the Laundromat Project, former mentor at the New Museum Incubator (New Inc.), and a former Project Fellow at NYU ITP. Her work has been commissioned by the Anchorage Museum, Earthseed, Good Mirrors, Collective Acceleration, Borders Like Water, Movement for Black Lives, Root Rise Pollinate and Creative Wild Fire and licensed by Nonprofit Quarterly, marginalia, Leadership Learning Community, Cooper Hewitt, and the Center for Third World Organizing. Her work with Intelligent Mischief has been included in Occupancies @ Boston University Art Galleries (2017); Who Owns Black Art (Zeal Coop, 2019); How To Survive @ Anchorage Museum (2024); Witness @ Photoville (Good Mirrors, 2024), and Alhamdu: Muslim Futurism @ Colorado College Fine Arts Center (2024-3925). With Intelligent Mischief she has co-created experiential futurist installations at Carnegie Hall, Tone Gallery in Memphis, TN and Nation X, a virtual 24 hour rave all based on collectively imagined future worlds in which Black people are thriving, sovereign, and free. She cultivates immersive dream spaces, transformative experiences that guide individuals and groups in imagining visceral, palpable, irresistible visions of more beautiful futures.
Genel ambrose
(She/Her) Collaborator, Social Dreaming
Genel Ambrose is a strategist and founder working at the intersection of culture, creativity, and technology. She operates across brand strategy, experiential design, and the art × tech space to build programs and initiatives that shape how people relate to ideas, brands, and each other.
She spent six years at Apple leading strategy and execution of cultural programs, experiential campaigns and brand partnerships across major U.S. cities - redefining how communities engage with technology and translating Apple's values into experiences that moved people.
Genel leads GOOD MIRRORS, a social practice studio and research consultancy rooted in the belief that creativity, connection, and story are practices that help us expand what becomes possible for ourselves, our communities and the world. Good Mirrors studies these practices and harnesses art and technology to transmit and preserve them.
A first-generation Caribbean-American from New York City, she has earned dual bachelor degrees in Journalism and Sociology from New York University and a MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Genel is a proud alum of the Jackie Robinson Foundation and the New Museum incubator, New Inc.
SALIMAH HANKINS
(She/her) Collaborator, Leadership & Transformation
Salimah K. Hankins, Esq, CPC (she/her) is a seasoned executive coach with a diverse background in community organizing, law, international relations, and executive leadership. She brings a unique blend of empathy, strategic thinking, and creativity to her coaching practice.
Salimah is also a singer/songwriter, musician, Broadway performer and intuitive healer who harnesses the power of creativity and the arts to connect BIPOC and queer folx with their life's purpose.
Salimah’s journey as a human rights advocate and lawyer to executive coach and small business owner has equipped her with the skills to guide others on their path to success. She has also created a number of events supporting Black, directly impacted communities.
Salimah is a certified professional coach and received coaching certification through Leadership That Works, which is an International Coaching Federation accredited school. She received additional advanced coaching certification from Coaching for Healing, Justice, and Liberation—a BIPOC-led coaching school within the Rockwood Leadership Institute.
EMMANUELLE ASUMENG
(She/Her) Studio Operations Manager