Community Collaborators
Community Collaborators
The CEI collaborates with artists and arts organizations aligned with our ethos on programming, projects, residencies, and more. Community collaborations are reviewed and funded through collective decision-making processes driven by CEI core partner leadership. Through these community collaborations, we invest in a culture of resource sharing and mutual aid for a vibrant arts community that forefronts equity and creative justice.
Interested in collaborating with the CEI? Reach out to incubator@artsconnectinternational.org for more information.
Past Community Collaborators
UnBound Bodies Collective
UnBound Bodies Collective (UBB) s a experiemental Queer Trans Black and Latine transdisciplinary creative space|place making and tending collective. We create care-centered spaces as a means to explore and honor Queer Trans Black Indigenous People of Color (QTBIPoC) culture, knowledge sharing, healing, and community building. The tangible products (events, shows, filmfests, workshops, and suppers) that emerge from our tending practices are significant because of the time and energy we devote to exploration, dreaming, research, and care for our communities. All UBB offerings center the narratives and lived experiences of QTBIPoC. We believe this centering practice enables the cultivation of a nourishing and generative creative community. The practice of centering QTBIPoC also resists the real material and embodied violence of white supremacy–enacted through racism, trans/homophobia, ableism, gentrification, and other violences directed against us as QTBIPoC. UBB is committed to Black Queer futurity and we believe we can conjure and manifest the liberatory futures we desire/deserve–through a wide range of creative collaborations that honor our ancestors, elders, communities, and ourselves.
XAVIERA
The Diahann Project
XAVIERA (b. 1997) is the American first-born of her Dominican family tree. Born in Paterson, NJ and reborn in Boston, MA, Xaviera’s interdisciplinary arts practice is a lifelong testament to her healing and survival as informed by personal experience, academic rigor, and ancestral knowledge. With a BFA in Studio Art & Art History from SMFA at Tufts, Xaviera engages with curation, poetry and prose, performance, photography, videography, installation, and music to create immersive experiences. A shapeshifter at heart and a trickster at best, Xaviera is empowered to assume the self and utilize the mediums most critical to accessing worlds where freedom and truth reign manifest.
The CEI hosted an exhilarating debut electronic dance mixtape listening party to enjoy the indulgent sounds of jersey trap, house, and reggaeton all while honoring Black queer nightlife subcultures. Más Querida is an imaginative dreamscape born from the desire and yearning for intimacy amidst isolation
The Diahann Project (TDP) was started in 2017 by Stefanie as an intersectional catalyst for exploring her own creative health. TDP centers BIPOC visual storytelling through photojournalism + portrait photography.
"Diahann" is actually Stefanie's very often mispronounced middle name that is rooted in her mother's love for the renown 80's Black Actress, Diahann Carroll. Interestingly this name continues to symbolize the intersectional points of Stefanie's ever-evolving creative identity as a kinesthetic creative + visual storyteller.
In 2025, the CEI and Art in the Antilles hosted the Diahann Project in an artist residency culminating in a gallery show at the CEI gallery.
Tambacum
Liyang Network
TRUTH: A Bio-fictional Choreopoem
Tambacum is Tamborito, somos Cumbancha, somos raíces, somos muchas danzas. Somos una agrupación de músicas tradicionales de #Nuquí y un colectivo que trabaja por el rescate de las tradiciones artísticas y culturales siendo puente entre generaciones. Creemos en nuestra tierra, en nuestra gente, en nuestra identidad. Acompañamos eventos y apoyamos proyectos/iniciativas culturales, sociales y ambientales a través de la música, la danza y la pintura.
Liyang is a local to global advocacy network that amplifies the calls to action of grassroots communities in the Philippines.
We started in the Philippines at the request of Lumad indigenous communities in Mindanao who wanted a network to bring together their allies from the Philippines and beyond to help promote their calls to action.
In 2020, we expanded our advocacy work to include land and environmental defenders and other grassroots communities throughout the country.
Truth: a bio-fictional choreopoem is a new play combining spoken word, storytelling, movement and music to tell the stories of 19th century black female abolitionists. Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Hayden and women of lesser known history serve as prototypes for the characters of the play. Truth consists of fragments of story, primary source materials, carte de visites, biography and U.S. history of slavery. Current scholarship in Africana studies, on the powerful and forceful role that Black abolitionists played in catalyzing an end to U.S. slavery, heavily influences the thought of the play.
What People Are Saying
“The Boston Foundation is proud to support this community-driven, BIPOC-led initiative that is guiding our arts and culture sector towards a more just and collaborative future. We look forward to seeing the new ways of working that CEI imagines and brings into being. ”
“We are ecstatic to host in residence the Cultural Equity Incubator, we look forward to supporting each of your important work and collective growth.”
