Welcome to the 4th Annual
Thank you Dream Team!
Meet the incredible Beautiful Blackbird Children’s Book Festival Planning and Production Committee. For over a year this group of talented, dedicated individuals have been working tirelessly on all components required to bring this Festival to light.
Thank You
The Beautiful Blackbird Children’s Book Festival team would like to offer our gratitude to these three creatives who produced outstanding video and sound productions during our pandemic years. Their brilliance gave joy and hope to hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown children in lockdown. Because of you, the festival spread its wings. Thank you, Blackbirds!
Yoon Byun
Yoon S. Byun is a creative problem solver, a strategist, and a planner who thrives on the fly. Through his background in photojournalism, Yoon’s work stays on point with storytelling that is intimate and relatable. He is the co-founder of Strewn Wonder, a storytelling company working with nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. It is a creative collaboration with his wife, Chelsea Conaboy, officially launching in late 2021. He is the lead video producer for the 2021 Beautiful Blackbird Children’s Book Festival.
Yoon has also applied his passion for mentoring by teaching documentary photography and film at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies at MECA, and is a coach at Boot Camp for New Dads through Maine Boys to Men, a nonprofit that works to change the definition of masculinity and end violence against women and girls.
Ridah Ridah
Atiim Chenzira & Jason Williams (aka JasWho?) have over 40 years of music composition, production, and sound design between them, and are an amazing team to hire for your next sound environment project. Together they make up Ridah Ridah Entertainment (R2E), a sound design and music composition company. R2E has leveraged their legacy skill sets of indoor/outdoor sound design and music composition to create sound environments for films, built environments (art installations and more), video & music projects, as well as read aloud books.
Atiim Chenzira is a musician, songwriter, spoken word poet, community activist and family therapist. Cultivated in the rich musical soil the Eastbay, his music is an eclectic mix of New Age Hip Hop, Old School Soul and Jazz Poetry.
Jay Williams, aka JasWho?, is a veteran live musician who has toured the US, Japan and England with various bands, including as a keyboardist, guitar and bass player with improv experimental dance music ensemble Playground and Elektra records project Family Funk.