Women’s History Month: Comedy Show & Storytelling Workshop at Brooklyn Borough Hall

Join Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso this Thursday to celebrate the “Women Who Tell Our Stories” with an evening of comedy and storytelling at Brooklyn Borough Hall in honor of Women’s History Month. Comedians Chanel Ali and Sara Hennessey from the Brooklyn Comedy Collective will perform stand-up sets, followed by a micro-workshop on storytelling and placemaking led by Brooklyn-based artist Kira Joy Williams of The Laundromat Project.

Kira’s workshop honors the radical history of Black women storytellers and craft-workers who used quilting in order to preserve cultural memory and communicate across physical distances and generations. Kira will first share her oral history and visual storytelling project, Home is in the Stories, highlighting stories shared with her by Black women in Brooklyn. Participants will then be invited to partake in an interactive version of this project, sharing their stories of home and capturing portraits of one another. At the workshop’s close, participants – with Kira’s guidance – will create a collective, photo-based story-quilt. The evening celebration is made possible by the support of Brooklyn for All, Inc. and Ponce Bank.

ABOUT CHANEL ALI

Chanel Ali is a standup comic who blossomed on the Philadelphia circuit before taking her commanding stage presence and storyteller style to NYC. She’s been featured on MTVs Girl Code, Comedy Central, Tru TV and Starz.

ABOUT SARA HENNESSEY

Sara Hennessey is an acclaimed Toronto comedian who now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her big credit is Just For Laughs Montreal, which she has performed at numerous times. Sara is the co-star, co-creator, and co-writer of the CBC Comedy series Terrific Women. She has 3 comedy albums available: Huge Bitch, They Know Too Much, and Trouble in Saradise.

ABOUT KIRA JOY WILLIAMS

Kira Joy Williams (she/they) is an artist and community builder based in Brooklyn, NY on occupied Lenape land. Kira strives to contribute positively and generatively to existing visual representation of Black people in the U.S. by creating archival materials in collaboration with the very people being represented. Through photographs and oral history, Kira’s art explores notions of diaspora, home, care, and community. Her photographs and recorded histories exist in the wake of longstanding memory-work traditions that use the past to make sense of the present and construct a new future––one in which we all belong. Kira received a BA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University in 2015 and is currently a master’s student at Gallatin. Kira believes wholeheartedly in the power of art, abundance, and mutual aid, and in her plant babies.

ABOUT THE LAUNDROMAT PROJECT

The Laundromat Project (The LP) is a Black-rooted, POC-centered, community-based arts organization dedicated to the advancement of artists and residents of New York City as change agents within their own communities. The LP envisions a world in which artists and neighbors in communities of color work together to harness the power of creativity that has the ability to inspire and initiate meaningful change and that generates long-lasting impact. The LP makes sustained investments in growing a community of multiracial, multigenerational, and multidisciplinary artists and neighbors committed to societal change by supporting their artmaking, community building, and leadership development. http://eepurl.com/haIRJv