This interactive live Fast Forward event invited audiences to explore how musical storytelling extends beyond the stage to influence other sectors. At our Fast Forward: Technology as a Liberatory Tool, we began to investigate how technology can serve artists and creators.

To ground the discussion in lived artistic practice, we’ve engaged two artist case studies. EmmaLee Kidwell and Maria Isabella Andreoli are developing Come See Your Future, a mixed-reality musical that reimagines how audiences experience narrative across physical and digital space. Inyosi Sebenzekhaya is creating Priestess Portals, an evolving work exploring how spiritual technologies and extended reality can merge to generate new forms of ritual, embodiment, and collective transformation. Technologists Aaron Santiago and Dr. Courtney D. Cogburnwill joined the conversation to help audiences better understand how awareness can create agency as we imagine together how technology can be used to fuel the change we want to see in the world.

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About MTF MTF equips artists to create musical stories as a collective force for justice, healing, and radical imagination.

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CREDITS

Produced by | MTF Musicals

Hosted by | Brisa Areli Muñoz

Featuring | EmmaLee Kidwell & Maria Isabella Andreoli, INYOSI Sebenzekhaya (b. Nia O. Witherspoon) PhD, Aaron Santiago, & Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn

Production

Creative Director | Andrea Negrete

DP | Andrew Young

Editing | Andrew Young

Sound Mixing | Falan Nuhring

MTF Team

Abigail Grubb | Director of Interdependence & Collective Care

Andrea Negrete | Director of Access & Advocacy

AriDy Nox | Director of Decolonization & Sustainability

Brisa Areli Muñoz | Director of Artistic Innovation & Emergent Magic

Brandon Powers | Artistic Innovation Lead

Falan Nuhring | Coordinator of Connectivity & Systems

Sidney Erik Wright | Artistic Programs Lead

MTF Board of Directors

Amy Goldwasser

Ariel Estrada

Catherine Pulley-Dennison

Cheyenne Myrie

Isabel Quinzaños Alonso

M Von Nida

Special Thanks To

The MTF Community & MTF Makers Past and Present

Kelindah Bee | Producer of Fast Forward Live Tapings

Sol & Yue Productions

Shakina Nayfack | Founding Artistic Director

Mei Ann Teo | Former Artistic Director

Walter

MTF’s Institutional Support

The Mellon Foundation

Joseph F. Savage Jr. Charitable Foundation

Howard Gilman Foundation

The Jerome Foundation

Fast Forward is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.