Black PAtti

Hanifah Walidah is a writer, musician, film director, actor and native New Yorker currently living and working in Brooklyn, NYC.

MUSIC BIO
She first debuted as hip hop artist Sha-Key with her 1994 LP "A Headnadda's Journey to Adidi-Skizm". She was co-founder of two poet/performance collectives The Vibe Khamelons and The Boom Poetic in the early nineties; which were both are accredited for laying the foundation Hip Hop fused poetry. Hanifah, over the past 10 years, has lent her voice, lyrics and performance to the mammoth funk sound of the Brooklyn Funk Essentials, recorded singles "Not Every Angel" and "Pick It Up" from French producer Alex Kid's LP's "Beinvida" and "Mint" and the title track "All Night Madness" (originally written for Grace Jones) from the latest release from Grammy-award winning German producer Mousse T and super electronica group The Crystal Method. In 2004 she concieved and produced a hip-hop opera "Adidi-The Untold Story" which featured Saul Williams, Mums the Schemer (HBO's OZ) and the music of Earl Blaize (Antipop Consortium); released on Tamamuzik/France. In 2006 she was the musical director of “What It Iz”, a hip hop/spoken-word adaptation of "The Wiz". She recently toured Europe, with a spot date at Celebrate Brooklyn, with the reunited Brooklyn Funk Essentials; currently in the studio, Hanifah has produced two single tracks for the band. In Spring 2007 she will fly to Istanbul to record with the Brooklyn Funk Essentials and Turkish jazz artist Husnu. There she will make history by recording the first gay themed song about her Jamaican girlfriend with a famed artist in a moslem country. And with the release of her new single "Make A Move", accompanied by a self-produced and directed video to debut on LOGO Decemebr 3rd, 2006 she prepares for the winter release of her long awaited sophomore LP "Once Upon It Is" off of her digital online based label Trust Life Releases.

THEATER BIO
In 1997, she wrote and performed in the multi-cast play "Bloom" which featured an entire cast of women of color and used the analogy of Black women to dandelions (Tony Morrison’s, The Bluest Eye); which are flowers often mistaken for weeds. She received the NYFA Fellow for Poetry in 1999. In 2002 she wrote and performed her one-woman show "Black Folks Guide to Blacks" funded in part by the Zellerbach Foundation and the Queer Cultural Center in San Francisco. Initially entitled "Straight Black Folks Guide to Black Folks", it has been met with heralded reviews in the SF Chronicle, Boston Globe and SF Guardian.

FILM BIO
Hanifah Walidah began her film career from a labor of love while maintaining an online site, www.suckaforlife.com, that featured a multitude of documentary, experimental and narrative film shorts; all of which were written, directed, edited and scored by Hanifah. She directed and edited a 3 minute short "True Grits" within a 24 hour period as apart of the NYC Midnight Run where it placed Best Of. She was hired by James Spooner, filmmaker of the internationally awarded documentary Afropunk to co-write his new and anticipated narrative film White Lies Black Sheep. Hanifah produced, wrote and directed a film short masquerading as a music video for her single "Make a Move" of the OnceUpon it is LP. This video would be a first of its kind that depicted gay women of color in a celebratory, complex and witty manner. An accompanying documentary featuring the behind the scene discussions, intimate moments, background information, an undocumented history of black lesbians and operations of the music video is in production.