FabLab’s Mission

FabLab  provides a vital space for QTBIPOC culture bearers to conjure and celebrate the legacies of our queer ancestors through a series of monthly creative playshops igniting a fabulous re-telling of queer history facilitated by the fiercest QTBIPOC creative voices. Facilitators introduce participants to queer ancestors as inspiration for the creation of fresh new work exploring dance, performance, visual art, video, music,  and spoken word.  

Participants help us introduce these ancestors to a wider audience with creative projects that weave their inspiring histories back into community consciousness. Participants are invited to share their inspired creations on social media and tag us @eyezenpresent and #FabLab. Participants will also share their ancestor inspired art at two Celebration of Life events in honor of the highlighted ancestors.

A Note on Acronyms

QTBIPOC- Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Culture

* POC formerly utilized as “people of color”; we are strategically using the term “People Of Culture” because we would like to address the issues of colorism implicit in the term “color”.

2SLGBTQIA+ Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, Plus

We are thrilled to announce we've been awarded the Artist Power Convening Grant from Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to support our FabLab program with community partners SOL VIDA and LATINX MAFIA !

This grant will allow us to expand the program beyond our monthly playshops to include one Celebration of Life event in June 2022! These events will provide a platform for playshop participants to build relationships with other QTBIPOC artists in the community. The Celebrations will raise the bar on opportunities to educate the public about QTBIPOC histories with creative activities by the artists and participants that will have an enduring impact.

FabLab’s Vision for Our Community

FabLab envisions a global community in which the names, voices, and contributions of QTBIPOC ancestors are woven back into the fabric of our cultural narratives. Embodied knowledge of who and where we come from helps provide us joy, resilience, solace, and clearer vision of our path forward.

FabLab’s Values

We believe that an embodied knowledge of who and where we come from helps provide us joy, resilience, solace, and clearer vision of our path forward.

FabLab honors the astounding cultural and social contributions and struggles of relatively unknown queer ancestors and brings life to their lost histories. FabLab gives image to the unseen and transforms the forgotten.

SOL VIDA is shifting normalcy from systemic oppression to radical freedom utilizing dance and expressive arts as tools for personal transformation, collective liberation and embodied healing justice. We are dedicated to preserving Afro-Diasporic cultural traditions, creating progressive, multigenerational dance communities, and affinity spaces for education, empowerment, leadership and advocacy. To provide safe spaces for Queer, Trans, Black and Indigenous People of Culture (QTBIPoC and BIPoC) as well as Two-spirit, lesbian, gay, trans, queer, intersex, aesexual and gender expansive identities (2SPLGBTQIA+ ). We are a global movement company that uses dance and expressive arts to release people from feeling traumatized, isolated, stressed out, ashamed, shut down, afraid and insecure and give them safe, sacred inclusive havens to express themselves fully, restoring confidence, sparking life creativity and sharing tools to disrupt and break down the oppressive systems in society.

Latinx Mafia is a collective of diverse Latinx/e identified artists. The group was born out of a need to address our collective experiences with racist, problematic and misunderstood casting and storytelling practices of Latinx/e stories in a white-dominated media space. We come together in community to advocate for our radically accurate representation, to provide support and resources for Latinx-identified artist and to uplift our talent. Our mission is to empower and support Latinx teatristas by reclaiming, demystifying and recreating Latinx representation in theatre/media and ensuring that Latinx representation in theatre and media radically and accurately embraces historically marginalized communities including but not limited to: the LGBTQiA2 community, indigenous and Afro-Latinx people, differently-able folks, migrants regardless of immigration status, and the many linguistic backgrounds in Latin America.

April (Axé) Charmaine (she/they)

Ah-shay, Mama Shae, Ms. Axé are all fond and welcomed greetings for the woman who has lived in the fields of dance, education, inspiration for 30 + years--she started dancing at the age of 9, not knowing at the time that dance would become the healing force and constant grounding of her life, she became a first year student at the Denver School of the Arts, went on to Cleo Parker Robinson Dance TrainingGroup (later to teach youth programming), took her first international dance and drumming excursion to Ghana, West Africa in 1998, all while picking up an innumerable force of classes from master teachers from around the world, including an intensive study and award certification from the Silvestre program in Salvador de Bahia, Brasil in 2015.

​Her later practice has called her into the depths of embodiment through the bodies of work involving embodied rites of passage work with Soma Source, infused with 5 Rhythms and deep dives into the conscious and ecstatic dance movements. She founded Sol Vida Dance Studio, The Denver Dance Project, East Dance Company, The Edge, Unwind and Grind: The Official Divine Booty Shaking Experience™)and most recently, One Sol.

Seth Eisen (he/him)

San Francisco-based artist creating a hybrid of live performance and visual media. He engages LGBTQ history as a living, breathing dialogue by researching lost legacies and reflecting his findings on stage. Central to his artistic vision is the combining of puppetry and object manipulation with visual art, writing and dance in a layered and unified aesthetic. He devises work through rigorous historical research and creative interviews revealing subversive histories. Eisen’s work expands the dialogue between static and live art as a vehicle to broaden human perspectives and effect social change while honoring queer ancestors and evolving queer culture.

For the past 20 years, Eisen staged performance pieces, street spectacles and installations and has curated and appeared in a number of collaborative projects created with other Bay Area artists. In 2007, Eisen founded Eye Zen Presents, a theater company that promotes social change by linking Queer history and aesthetics to contemporary Queer culture.

L. Duarte (they/them)

L. Duarte (they, them) is a Bay Area radical queer, director, actor, playwright, activist and teaching artist whose recent projects include: Cry of Curs (an adaptation of Coriolanus by Ken Kelleher) with Tabard Theatre, The Review with Theatre Rhinoceros , Particle of Dread with Anton’s Well, Helen! With Theatre of Yugen, Into the Beautiful North & The King of Cuba with CentralWorks. They have also worked with Willows Theatre Co, Berkeley Rep., Crowded Fire, Playwrights Foundation, SF Playground, Bay Area Children’s Theatre and various others. Duarte is a graduate of UCLA, UCSC, and has trained with A.C.T. and Shakespeare & Co. They are also TBA Titan Finalist and a former San Francisco Shakespeare and Women’s Will Teaching Artist.

Duarte is a founding member of Latinx Mafia, a Bay Area collective of Latinx Teatristas, who work to ensure Latinx stories are valued and accurately represented. They are also a company member of In Full Color and Lez Writes. Their hope for all their work is trying to center their personal practice in liberation pedagogy.

To catch Duarte live join them a PacRep in Julius Caesar! Find a full range of work by Duarte at
www.sfcasting.com/leticiaduarte

Jesse Annette Koehn (they/them)

Jess has been an arts administrator in the Bay Area since interning at Cal Shakes in 2015. Jess started as an education intern and teaching artist with the Coterie Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, working primarily with grades k-5. They also worked as a guest director with Winnetonka High School where they taught an after school movement masterclass and directed two blackbox productions, one of which performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014. Since moving to the Bay Area, Jess has been a stage manager, production manager, associate producer, venue manager, casting associate, stage director, and stage electrician. They have worked with companies such as Cal Shakes, American Conservatory Theater, TheatreWorks, Z Space/Word for Word, Shotgun, Bay Area Children’s Theater, The Children’s Creativity Museum, and SFFILM. Jess is currently working towards their masters in nonprofit management at Northeastern University.