Who We Are
bkSOUL was founded in 2001 by Dr. grace shinhae jun as a space to explore the relationship between Hip Hop culture and movement forms, debuting with the evening length work Women Warriors in Love & Hip Hop. The company began as a bi-coastal company (San Diego – Brooklyn), teaching and performing at various venues in Southern California, Brooklyn, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, Indiana, San Francisco, and Mexico.
In 2006, bkSOUL deepened its roots in San Diego and began collaborating with Collective Purpose (Ant Black, Kendrick Dial and Rudy Francisco), blending together movement, poetry, and live music to center on issues of social justice and communities of color through the aesthetics of Hip Hop. In 2016, celebrating the 10 years of working together the dancers, the poets, and musicians fully merged to perform solely as the collective performance group bkSOUL.
bkSOUL’s cross cultural collaborations have created eight evening length works: The Movement (2007), Hip Hop Saved My Life (2009), Love H.E.R. (2013), Illegible (2015), Still Moving (2016), The Lioness (2017), Get Free (2019), Between Play & Pause (2022), and received “Best Musical Performance” (2016), “Outstanding Performance” (2017), and “Outstanding Multidisciplinary Production” (2019) for their work at the San Diego International Fringe Festival. bkSOUL was in residence at Lawrence University in 2018 performing their critically-acclaimed work Illegible.
As educators, mothers, fathers, activists, and artists, bkSOUL is committed to education through the arts and creating work that uplift the stories of our communities.
