Beyond EMagination
A monthly radio show where we chat with artists, healers, and change-makers who are creating the world they way to see. Live on EM-Radio.com the third Sunday of each month from 2-4pm.
On Beyond EMagination, I chat with artists, healers, change-makers/ all-around dazzling humans taking stock of themselves and the world around them in order to create what they to see. We trade curiosities, learnings, and hot takes mixed with a healthy dose of transcendent tracks tuned to the theme of each segment. Catch us on Electromagnetic Radio the third Sunday of each month from 2-4pm.
Up Next:
Chinisha is an award-winning producer, director, writer, performer, and multi-media artist with over 15 years of experience in TV, film, and live production. She has created work for major media & arts institutions including Netflix, Comedy Central, CNN, Sesame Street, PBS, Firelight, Left/Right, VICE, NPR, Okayplayer, Caveat, Symphony Space, Carnegie Hall, and more. She received a Webby Award (2022) for her work writing and producing the series Black History in Two Minutes with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. She enjoys doing the NY Times puzzle in pen but prefers the app on her phone.
We’ll be talking about the history of Juneteenth, Chinisha’s past annual celebrations of the day – the Juneteenth Jubilee, the #blackdollarsmakesense campaign with @diasporicdollar and putting your money towards Black businesses, responding to white paralysis when waking up to racial injustice, and her work on the award-winning series, Black History in Two Minutes!
Previous Shows
Animal Wisdom
Do you believe in ghosts? Take a virtual front row seat for this original film of the acclaimed musical séance, Animal Wisdom, where singer-songwriter-soothsayer Heather Christian lays to rest the souls that haunt her.
Christian shapeshifts between rock star, folklorist and high priestess as she conjures a constellation of souls in an effort to confront her family’s mythologies. With raucous, ferocious music that fuses blues, gospel and folk, Heather Christian invites you to raise a glass to the unseen forces that shape our lives.
Adapted from the stage production that had a sold-out and acclaimed run at The Bushwick Starr, Animal Wisdom offers a transporting experience where a concert becomes a mass, and a mass becomes a séance, all in your living room.
I originally co-directed Animal Wisdom at The Bushwick Starr in 2017; I’m thrilled to have stage directed this one of a kind experience in collaboration with film director Amber Mcginnis, produced by Woolly Mammoth, American Conservatory Theater and the Bushwick Starr. The film streamed on Broadway on Demand from May 15th to June 13th 2021.
Learn more about the film and all the amazing humans who were part of making it here.
“Sinewed with vivid portraits of the quirky deceased, and ending with a gospel-flavored requiem mass, this remarkable show acknowledges mortality, but does so with ecstatic liveliness. ”
“With top-notch technical prowess, the film’s director Amber McGinnis, and Emilyn Kowaleski, who handled the stage direction, combine live and pre-recorded elements into a vivid and seamless presentation of Christian’s opus.”
Exploding Knot
Exploding Knot generates explosive inquiries into paradigms of power. We create through a collaborative research-based practice in an incendiary combination of artistic disciplines.
Exploding Knot has produced workshops, productions, and exploratory processes of the following:
a sixteen part epic poetry series for stage and film
This Play was NOT written by a Woman
a devised performance collage about identity and the personas we create for ourselves
Weather
a surrealistic play about a 14-year old figuring out how to thrive as a girl on this planet
Eversion (or that time my heart flew out of my mouth)
a concert style docudrama exploring romance and rejection
Throw. Me. Under. World.
a sultry experimental musical radically reinterpreting Greek mythology
Love Notes For Liberation
A collection of love notes to self, offered with love to you.
Our Heroine
A sixteen part performance poem that travels through the life of a mythic yet modern anti-heroine on the brink of erupting the world
Our Heroine tells the story of her body- the policing and abuses of it, the way she shares it, and the way it heals. These poems are an ode to resiliency and a prayer to the power of our voices.
Our Heroine is an Exploding Knot production.
Our Heroine: The Legend was filmed in collaboration with Uptown Works in January 2018, co-directed by Sagan Chen.
“Emilyn Kowaleski and Sagan Chen, in collaboration with Uptown Works, showed the poem-film Our Heroine, a mythic re-writing of the all-too-familiar story of femme silence. Text unfurled across faces radiant with multi-hued light. Mouths opened to spill secrets of creation and destruction. Luminous orbs replaced tongues as they spoke their truths. Here was a powerful vision: legend-makers for a new world. ”
Our Heroine is being adapted into a series of short films and designed into an illustrated chapbook. Interested in supporting that process? Reach out!
Bawdy of the Bathroom
This creative non-fiction book dives deep into the sewer system of American history to illuminate the historical origin story of sex-segregated bathrooms and the lineages of fear and shame that flow through their pipes.
Sex-Segregated bathrooms have become such a firmly embedded part of our cultural architecture in the United States that many have come to think of them as a perfectly logical, or natural fixture of our society. They have become hotly contested in recent years as lawmakers attempt to enact restrictions on transgender and gender non-confroming people’s use of the bathroom that best matches their identity. Yet we rarely pause to ask ourselves how we got these neatly gendered fixtures in the first place? Who were they meant to serve, and under what pretense? Bawdy of the Bathroom traces women’s professed discomfort and fear of sexual endangerment in bathrooms back to their roots. When one plunges into this history, one can see that it is the “smallest room” that houses the most mammoth of ideologies. The bathroom is a prism that has both absorbed human social ideologies and angst and reflected them out in a magnified view.
Through a compelling combination of rigorous historical research and intimate personal storytelling this text will encourage readers to examine where this history lives in their bodies, as I locate for them where it lives in mine.
Are you an editor or publisher? Did this pique your interest?
Email me!I’ll be happy to send you a full proposal.