We had the great honor of speaking with Madame Christiane Dolores.  Do not miss this! 

Multi-platform cross-disciplinary artist, Christiane Dolores, a.k.a. Madame Dolores, employs sound, vision, text, and performance as storytelling tools to create radical, sometimes controversial, cultural engagements. At the heart of r work is a humanistic empathy that questions our inability to coexist and reimagines new mythologies of inclusion and belonging. Her practice is rooted in responding to compelling questions about cultural definitions, the root of hatred, cognitive dissonance, binary systems, and the ongoing social conflicts of Us vs Them. She thinks of what she does as social-cultural anthropology, employing the ethnographic technique by culling audio, text and images to create a record of our struggle to be human. Her textual, visual, musical work responds to burgeoning questions about human behavior and inhuman cruelty. How are these confounding, at times, disturbing actions seen through the lens of justice, compassion and understanding and how will that propel us to evolve? Madame Dolores has earned many accolades and opportunities for her work. In 2017, she received the Pittsburgh Business Times Women First award, and in 2014, was commissioned by The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust to create a song and lead Pittsburgh’s inaugural Complaints Choir during the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival. She has also been recognized as the winner of an 2010 August Wilson Center Fellowship; an awardee of a 2011 and 2020 grant from Advancing the Black Arts in support of solo musical releases; a 2007 honoree at the New Hazlett Theatre “Celebrating Women in the Arts; a 2003 winner of the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship for World/Jazz/Blues musical composition; and a 2002 Pittsburgh Magazine “40 under 40” award winner. She received funding from Sprout for two MiniM Music Festivals for the Blues and Jazz genres and for “Listen to This, featuring poetess, Ursula Rucker; a commission from Pittsburgh Foundation to write her first play, Saffronia; funding from Multi-Cultural Arts Initiative to produce Saffronia: the Mulatto Slave, which came in 2nd place at the Trinidad Theater Festival, in 2016. Madame Dolores is the founding member of the #notwhite collective, a group of 13 femme artists who use their art to make their stories visible as they excavate histories, expose realities, and exorcise oppression. She has also been very dedicated to the arts community as the artist relations manager at the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, where she worked for 15 years leading several landmark programs and increasing engagement and support of typically underserved artists, especially people of color and women, and is now currently working at the Pittsburgh International Airport’s Art as their technical assistant of arts and culture.

www.madamechristianedolores.com

Music site is: www.madamedolores.rocks 

Sondra Woodruff https://news.columbia.edu/content/musician-sondra-woodruff-takes-her-talent-columbia-local-community 

Soma Mestizo https://www.madamechristianedolores.com/soma-mestizo 

Boom Concepts https://www.boomuniverse.co/ 

Westmoreland Museum of American Art https://thewestmoreland.org/programs/artist-in-residency-program/ 

Billboard Project - Lead Artist Sheila Cuellar-Shaffer. https://makeourdifferencesourstrengths.com/about/ 

Zhiwan Cheung Seeing Colour Pod https://seeingcolorpod.com/ 

AS220 https://as220.org/