Subculture New York

Michael Holman is a filmmaker, artist, writer, musician, and a cultural force in New York City for over thirty years. A pioneer in the Downtown New York Art Scene and Uptown Hip Hop Scene, he co-founded the band Gray with painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, before creating and producing the first hip-hop television show, Graffiti Rock in 1984. As a writer and producer, Holman produced and directed children’s programming for Nickelodeon, award-winning MTV music videos, and wrote the screenplay to Miramax’s Julian Schnabel feature film, Basquiat. He taught screenwriting and filmmaking at Howard University, The New School For Social Research, and the School of Visual Arts. Holman continues to be active as an artist, writer, and lecturer in the field of contemporary urban culture, film, theater and art performing in museums around the world.

Tanisha Jones has worked in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division Collection at the NY Public Library since 2007, and is currently its Assistant Curator. As the former director of the Moving Image Archive, in collaboration with the Dance Division’s curator, she was responsible for managing the collections containing more than 25,000 dance films, videotapes and digital videos that preserve the ephemeral art of dance. Jones received her BA in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University.