User:LGBTology/Hanifah Walidah

Hanifah Walidah first debuted as hip hop artist Sha-Key whose 1994 album “A Headnadda’s Journey to Adidi-Skizm” was released on Imago/BMG to acclaimed reviews. She was on par with her peers and highly respected within the male centered art form. She also was co-founder of two poet/performance collectives The Vibe Khamelons and The Boom Poetic in the early nineties, who both are recognized as groundbreaking in creating the fusion of a hip hop approach to traditional beatnik verse. Hanifah’s innovative work with Hip Hop and poetry laid the tracks for master poets and fellow comrades Saul Williams and Sarah Jones. And accomplishing all this while living in the closet.

Once out, Hanifah has lent her voice, lyrics and performance to the mammoth funk sound of the Brooklyn Funk Essentials, recorded singles “Not Every Angel” and “Pick It Up” from French producer Alex Kid’s LP’s “Beinvida” and “Mint” and the title track to the latest release from Grammy-award winning German producer Mousse T and super electronica group The Crystal Method. In 2004 she released a hip-hop opera “Adidi-The Untold Story” which featured Saul Williams, Mums the Schemer (HBO’s OZ) and the music of Earl Blaize (Antipop Consortium). In 2006 she was the musical director of “What It Iz”, a hip hop/spoken-word adaptation of “The Wiz”. 2007 saw the reunion of the Brooklyn Funk Essentials and a new album “Whacha Playin” to which she wrote and co-produced many of the songs. While on tour with BFE she collaborated with La Bande Magnetique to create “We are the Light, a song that was made overnight and is currently on the U People Soundtrack.

“She is a mischievous mix media millennium whip. Hanifah Walidah speaks about black people and the gay community with a passion we associate with Zora Neale Hurston and Amira Baraka” –Ntozake Shange (Author-For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Isn’t Enough)

Theater

In 1997, she co-wrote and performed in the multi-cast play “Bloom” which featured an entire cast of women of color and used the analogy of Black women to dandelions (Tony Morrison’s, The Bluest Eye); which are flowers often mistaken for weeds. She received the NYFA Fellow for Poetry in 1999. In 2002 she wrote and performed her one-woman show “Black Folks Guide to Blacks” funded in part by the Zellerbach Foundation and the Queer Cultural Center in San Francisco. Initially entitled “Straight Black Folks Guide to Black Folks”, it has been met with heralded reviews in the SF Chronicle, Boston Globe and SF Guardian.

“More over Anna Deveare Smith - there’s a new queen of Solo performance in town…” (Boston Globe)

“A gap tooth Zora Neale Hurston” (SF Guardian)

FILM BIO Hanifah Walidah began her film career from a labor of love while maintaining an online site, www.suckaforlife.com that featured a multitude of documentary, experimental and narrative film shorts; all of which were written, directed, edited and scored by Hanifah. She directed and edited a 3-minute short “True Grits” within a 24-hour period as apart of the NYC Midnight Run where it placed Best Of. She co-wrote the new and anticipated film “White Lies Black Sheep” from James Spooner, filmmaker of the internationally awarded documentary Afropunk.

And spring of 2006, Hanifah produced, wrote and directed a film short masquerading as a music video for her single “Make a Move”. This video would be a first of its kind that depicted gay women of color in a celebratory, complex and witty manner. It debuted on LOGO’s New Now Next and then the Click List at #6. It still remains on the countdown.

She is presently working on a documentary entitled U People, which features the behind the scene discussions, intimate moments, background information and operations of the all women of color video. The new music video “Do You mind” off the soundtrack will be debut on MTV’s LOGO Channel this spring which was co-produced with Olive Demetrius and whose treatment was written by Hanifah.

“A comedic tour de force…” (SF Chronicle)