Baker Artist Portfolios

With 38 years of personal, professional and community-based experience, Dominic “Shodekeh” Talifero continues to make creative strides as a professional Breath Artist, Vocal Percussionist and Human Beatboxer who pushes the boundaries of the human voice within and outside the context of Hip Hop culture. After many years of evolving through the complex realms of providing original music for dance technique courses for such esteemed institutions as the American Dance Festival @ Duke University, NYU Tisch School of Dance and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Talifero has also taken on the creative challenges of composing for Meredith Monk & the House Foundation, the One Beat Golden Record Remix Project in collaboration with NASA JPL, Sō Percussion for a commissioned world premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2021 and the 2025 Emmy-nominated documentary "King Coal" on PBS.

Cultivating his abilities as an arts-based investigator over the years has led Shodekeh to extraordinary advanced research opportunities as across many fields of inquiry including a "Neuroscience of Art" fellowship at the Salzburg Global Seminar, an on-site 2023 - 2024 fellowship at the Presidential Library of George Washington's Mount Vernon, a teaching arts + research residency through the 2024 - 2025 National Endowment for the Humanities Professorship at the office of "Creativity & Innovation" @ Colorado College and the Smithsonian Folkways album "Achai" by Alash, inspired in part by his musical research and extensive collaborations with the ensemble in the United States and at the Tuvan Cultural Center / Ministry of Culture in Kyzyl, Tuva.

By discovering his passions for process art and the experimental humanities, Talifero has also been able to explore his penchant for dynamic pilot launches as the first "Innovator-in-Residence" and cultural steward of his living archive "Ideations of Potential" at Towson University, serving as the first Artist-in-Residence of the "Voyages" arts + sciences program at the National Aquarium, writing and designing an epistolary "living article" of the legal avant garde for the newly established "Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés" at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and by becoming the first Breath Artist-in-Residence and Anti-Racist Artist-in-Residence at Colorado College from 2024 - 2025.