• Adisa Anderson
• Queens Historical Society, Inc.

Adisa Anderson is a Storyteller, Educator, Producer, and Actor who was born in Los Angeles, California. He began his theatrical training at Cal Poly Pomona University and received his BA in Theater Arts in 1976 and MFA in Acting in 1978 from UCLA. An actor within the filmmakers collective, LA Rebellion, filmmakers at UCLA who produced films that served as an alternative to classical Hollywood cinema. His featured roles include Eli, the leading male in Julie Dash’s award-winning film, Daughters of the Dust. For over four decades he has engaged Black youth in his unique urban ritual theater, where participants recall, reclaim and celebrate cultural wholeness within Black play/performance spaces. He has served as the Director of Queens Historical Society, Inc. since its inception in 1989, producing the Society’s national school district tours for public school audiences in major and mid-tier metropolitan city markets. Adisa has directed over 400 of the Society’s performances, including its signature stage production, Queens of the Nile, Now and serves as its Dejali, (master storyteller). He and his late wife, Sakkara, were the first African Americans to travel to Kemet (Egypt) in 1986 with Dr. Joseph Benjamin Jochannan to present Black performance art on Nile Valley civilization. They use the “crowns” and royal attire of African heroines of the past much like the African mask worn during ritual ceremony by the Mende of Sierre Leone and the Bobo of Burkina Faso to empower the urban Black community.

Sakkara Thomas was born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Long Beach, California, and as a teen won the city’s first Miss Black Beauty Pageant before ultimately pursuing a career as a fashion designer. She studied at Woodbury University and Brooks College during the late 70s, eventually launching a successful career as a fashion designer. She was inspired by her first fashion Professor, an Egyptian native, to research the visual styles of Kemetic queens, which has evolved into her signature living history exhibition on African queenship and adornment, entitled Queens of the Nile, Now. It received its west coast premiere in 1981 by Maxine Waters’ Black Women’s Forum. Queen’s music score, Secret Life of Plants, was gifted by the composer himself, Stevie Wonder. In 1989 Sakkara founded Queens Historical Society, Inc, which fosters the cultural appreciation of African history/heritage amongst youth. During the following decade Sakkara led the establishment of the Society’s national K-12 curricular field trip, and in 2000 launched its seminal, Festival of African Royalty at California State University, Long Beach’s iconic Pyramid arena. Her work introduced the scholarship of 20th-century African-centered historians, including Cheik Anta Diop, Benjamin Jochannan, and Asa Hilliard, to the urban Black students. Her accommodations include Education & Culture Delegate for the National Summit on Africa, NAACP California Civil Rights Resolution, “History of Africa” and Official K-12 Programmer for the 2011 Nile Valley II Conference at Morehouse College. Toni Cade Bambara describes Sakkara’s artistic expressions as “Brain surgery without a scalpel.”

Speaking In:

• Movement, Memory, and Masquerades