Baker Artist Portfolios

Bashi Rose, founder of Konjur Collective is a Theatre Artist, Musician, Poet, Teaching Artist, and Filmmaker. He was raised in West Baltimore and was nurtured, inspired, and trained in his craft by the Baltimore Arts Community.  He has performed and had work produced in numerous venues including the High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music,  National Sawdust, Brooklyn Academy of Music, San Francisco Black Film Festival, Black Femme Supremacy Film Fest, Black Panther Party Film Festival, HipHop Theatre Festival, Creative Alliance, Baltimore Museum of Art, Arena Players, The Ottobar, Mind on Fire, Rhizome DC, The Out Music Festival, International Fringe Festival, and the Schomburg Center.  However, his work is often community-based. In  2007 he began facilitating a prison theatre program, Direct Responses Alleviate Misdirected Aggression (D.R.A.M.A.) at the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown, MD. In 2012 he was awarded an Open Society Institute fellowship to expand D.R.A.M.A.  Also, in 2007 he co-founded Dancing Many Drums (now New Generation Scholars); Baltimore youth study and travel throughout the African Diaspora. In early 2018 Bashi co-founded Konjur Collective, a multidisciplinary group using music, video, and spoken word to create radical, experimental, and spiritual Black expression.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Bashi seeks to evoke his ancestors' love/warrior spirit and to engage in collective improvisation that empowers individual artists to fully express themselves outside of capitalist constructs that tend to extract Black expression of its sacred, rebellious, and revolutionary spirit.