Meet the WARP Committee
The WARP Committee is a group of artists, educators, and activists who guide Bow Seat’s WARP efforts and help to bring the Contest to more Black, Indigenous, and Latine communities across the United States. They are also responsible for selecting each year’s WARP winners.
Jason is a co-founder and alumnus of Artists For Humanity (AFH), a Boston-area nonprofit that fuses art-making, entrepreneurial and business training, experiential arts and STEM learning, and audience engagement to create empowering and transformational experiences for under-resourced teens. Currently serving as Deputy Director and member of AFH’s Board of Directors, Jason has dedicated the last 29 years of his life ensuring that Boston’s young people are guided towards a successful life by encouraging their self-expression through art.
Jason was selected as one of Bank of America’s 2012 Neighborhood Builders, and he has received the Mentor of the Year Award from Youth Design. Jason is a member of WGBH’s Board of Advisors, and in 2014 he was awarded a spot on the Boston Business Journal’s “40 Under 40.” Jason is also still producing his own brand of visionary street art.
Nakia is a writer, journalist, and educator. She is the author of Water Carrier, a book of poetry, and I Still Did It, an intergenerational anthology on resilience. Nakia is the director of communications for Mayor Michelle Wu’s Community Engagement Cabinet for the City of Boston.
She was a co-writer for Here Comes the Break, a fictional audio-drama podcast for Double Elvis. Nakia’s writing has been published in the Boston Globe, Boston Art Review, Fodor’s Travel, and CRWN Magazine.
Nakia’s background is in journalism and in the arts education nonprofit sector. She is seasoned in launching and directing impactful programming and producing publications for youth. Learn more about Nakia by visiting nakiahill.com.
Free’s current work pulls inspiration from his childhood experience of moving to America as a refugee and experiencing this country as an outsider. He loves that he belongs to multiple cultures because it helps him weave together distant narratives and create a final product that feels both foreign and familiar. His goal is for people to experience his work as dissonant dreamscapes that connect subconscious and conscious realities.
Yanka is a multimedia artist and educator from Curitiba, Brazil, via Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work is inspired by her journey as an immigrant and explores gender, sexuality, intimacy, relationships, and comfortability. Shortly after graduating high school, Yanka joined Cambridge Community Television (CCTV) as a teaching artist. She also taught and mentored youth at Artists for Humanity. Yanka now serves as CCTV’s Youth Media Coordinator.
Warrior and healer. Tender and unbreakable. Destiny “Divine” Polk, whose name means “That which has been firmly established, God has answered, Dance,” is an Afro-Indigenous choreographer and producer, multi-disciplinary artist, community organizer/space holder, art educator and founder of art-activist platform Radical Black Girl. Known for doing interactive art shows likes RESISTDANCE and Black Woman is God, Destiny’s work is concerned with speaking truth to a country that attempts to rewrite its own history while having actively tried to suppress African and Native American history and culture. Destiny took her Being the Change workshop to SXSW 2019 and premiered her short film “When the Sea Rises” at the ILLUMINUS Festival 2019. She was the keynote speaker for the Youth Arts for Social Change Summit in 2020 and the recipient of the National Center of Afro-American Artist’s Ralph F. Browne, Jr. Award for Civic Engagement.
Mom. Student. Advocate. Poet. Wyze found her life’s passion as a social justice activist and youth advocate, which she is redirecting toward her education. As a proud Black and Native mom of two, she devotes herself toward her degree in the human services field. Through spoken word, she aims to provoke free thinking, radical self love, and healing. Wyze’s love for spoken word developed during a time when hip hop spoke through the silence. When silence is loud, not only words are spoken, but they are heard.
Marquis leads Elevated Thought’s vision, goals, and mission, and manages its contracts, commissions, and partnerships. In addition to being a poet and artist, Marquis has a master’s degree in Education from Lesley University and compiled over seven years of public-school experience before focusing on ET full-time; building and facilitating the art and social justice curriculum that serves as the foundation for all of ET’s creative youth development work. Marquis is currently pursuing his Doctor of Education at Northeastern University.