AfroMundo Festival: “Manifesting the Envisioned”
Thursday, April 16, 2026
7:00 pm
NHCC | Salón Ortega
2026 AfroMundo Festival: “Futurism: Manifesting the Envisioned”
Featured Regions: U.S. & U.S. Territories: Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, Mariana Islands
Artistic presentation by Puerto Rico’s award-winning Las Nietas de Nonó. Followed by a panel discussion and Q&A. Panelists include Las Nietas de Nonó; liberation strategist and fabulist Carlton “CJ” Davidson; multidisciplinary CHamoru artist Dakota Camacho; and Alabama playwright, performer and cultural worker David H. Parker. Moderated by artist AfroMundo Youth Council member, Lauryn Mills-Bohannon.
The 2026 AfroMundo Festival is free to the general public with limited seating and includes films, concerts, literature, oral traditions, panel discussions, culinary and other arts to foster a greater understanding of our shared humanity. Learn more at afromundo.org.
PLEASE MAKE YOUR RESERVATION HERE!
Carlton “CJ” V. Bell: Carlton V. Bell II “cj” (they/them) is a Black, Southern, and queer cultural organizer from Birmingham, Alabama. At the root of their work; cj practices art as liberation strategy to fabulate, investigate, and document the world around us through a Black-queer paradigm. As a cultural organizer and artistic facilitator, cj has raised over $2.5 million for artists and organizations led by and serving people living within the margins of the margins. Their work spans the stage and screen from producing and directing plays and musical across the country to creating short-form documentary and episodic projects that reimagine community, care, and liberation.
Dakot Camacho: Dakota Camacho comes from the Matao/CHamoru peoples of Låguas and comes from the villages of Tomhom, Mongmong, and Hagåtña, and descends from the Che’ and Eging clans, and they also have Ilokano lineage. Camacho was born in the lands of the Snohomish and raised in Snohomish, Swinomish, Duwamish, Muckleshoot, and Suquamish territories. They grew up in the Soufend of Seatle where they found their calling for poetry, dancing, and chanting. Amongst the Native peoples of that land, Black, Filipinx, and other Peoples working towards justice on earth, they learned of the transformative potential of culture. Camacho arrived in Guåhan, Låguas (the Mariånas) in the year 2011, to find Matao/CHamoru language and culture teachers. Camacho became friends with Jeremy Cepeda, a fino’ håya language teacher, and Jeremy guided Camacho on yo’ña (their) language learning journey. For many years, Camacho traveled around the world sharing their dance and musical creations, and cultivating relationships with Indigenous peoples in Aoteara, Turtle Island (so-called “North/South America”), Hawai’i, and momentarily so-called Australia and Africa. In 2019, Camacho and Cepeda started the Gi Matan Guma’ collective to give life to their ancestral language and traditions in an attempt to walk the path of ináfa’maolek (peace and equity for all living beings). Camacho started the MALI’E’ project to try and find ways to activate Theory/Memory/Imagining of (Making) Matao [Creativity] through multi-disciplinary art. Today, Dakota is very happy to be working with Gi Matan Guma’ in Låguas and throughout the diaspora.
Las Nietas de Nonó are the afro-diasporic siblings, mulowayi and mapenzi. In their creative process, they evoke ancestral memory through personal archives. Their practice incorporates performance, found objects, organic materials, ecology, fiction, video and installation. In 2022, their solo show, Posibles Escenarios, Vol. 1 LNN was presented at Artists Space, New York a grouping of newly commissioned multimedia works that extend Las Nietas’s explorations of themes such as processes of expropriation and colonial violence against Black communities and the development of microhistories in relation to geopolitics. They created Ilustraciones de la Mecánica in 2016 – a multimedia installation that was later commissioned by the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018) and the 79th Whitney Biennial (2019). They have received the Latinx Artist Fellowship from the US Latinx Art Forum (2022), the Rome Prize in Visual Art from the American Academy in Rome (2022), the United States Artist Award (2018), The Art of Change from the Ford Foundation (2017), and the Global Arts Fund from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice (2017 & 2020). Their art has been shown in Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, England, Germany, Italy, Norway, Scotland, and the United States. In 2019, they co-founded Parceleras Afrocaribeñas, an organization run by Black womxn, where spaces for environmental and racial justice are created in the face of industrial developments that threaten their barrio of San Antón, in Carolina, Puerto Rico.
David H. Parker (they/them) is a director, producer, screenwriter, playwright, performer, and cultural worker from Birmingham, AL. Intersectionality is at the core of their work, with directing practices rooted in consent and wellness. They have been with the Birmingham Black Repertory Theatre Collective for almost 7 years and now serve as one of its Co-Artistic Directors. They earned their Master of Fine Arts from UCLA and their BA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. David is grateful to claim multilocality, with roots and community in Texas, South Florida, Los Angeles, Baltimore, the Ozarks, and New York. David has directed or collaborated with Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award-winning artists. David has also worked on and Off-Broadway; had their work reviewed in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times; trained at the Highlander Center in the footsteps of cultural organizers like Rosa Parks and Angela Davis; and recently published an interview with André De Shields in Southern Theatre magazine.
MODERATOR: Lauryn Mills Bohannon