ABD Productions—a San Francisco-based multicultural organization committed to inspiring social change and awakening our collective humanity through the arts—birthed the Skywatchers Program in 2011. For the last ten years, Skywatchers has been bringing artists in to durational, collaborative relationships with residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, interrogating the poverty industrial complex and positioning community voices into the civic discourse through the arts. Skywatchers is rooted in the belief that relationship is the first site of social change, that large-scale transformation begins with intimate, interpersonal interaction, and that all stakeholders are transformed in this process—artists, participants, and witnesses. Associate Artistic Directors Malia Byrne, Dazié Grego Sykes, and Anne Bluethenthal, Resident Artists Shakiri, Gabriel Christian, and Deirdre Visser join an ensemble of 10-20 Tenderloin residents and artists who co-create the multi-disciplinary art works and collaborate in partnership with over a dozen Tenderloin non-profits and community groups.

Gabriel Christian is an american artist specializing in experimental choreography, high dramatics, social practice, and poetics. For more than ten years, their work has metabolized the vernaculars within BlaQ (Black+Queer) diaspora—futurity, afrovivalism, camp —through body-based live stage or public performances and digital interventions on their IG: @doom_body. At the heart of all of their work, they strive to excavate oral tradition and movement as conduits for equitable conversations around belonging, spirit, abundance, and care.

AhSa-Ti Nu is a multi-disciplinary artist, sound engineer and producer whose work is rooted in soul, jazz, R&B and gospel. Established as a solo artist in 2015, she utilizes soulfully-based music in a contemporary context to tell the untold stories of marginalized communities.

AhSa-Ti Nu’s creative process centers on the integrity and social context of communities of color, showing how music and poetry can act as modes of resistance and empowerment for the marginalized. Her work seeks to provide a platform for underrepresented communities and to create a space for the voices and experiences of women of color to be heard and seen. AhSa-Ti Nu uses her performances to challenge racism, misogyny, misrepresentation and centuries of oppression. The content of her presentations are deeply rooted in the rich sounds of African-American music through jazz, blues, R&B, gospel, reggae and rock as she seeks to engage in mutual teaching and learning with community members.