Fil Am Nexus to Sponsor Grace Nono

Photo by Brian Sergio

Film Am Nexus will sponsor PNDA’s LahiARTS as it presents multi-awarded singer and musician Grace Nono in “Songs and Stories for Our World” on Friday, May 31, 2019. Grace will talk about the relationship of mutual caring between a Mindanao healer and a mountain through histories of war and the rape of the earth. She will also offer prayer songs taught to her by Philippine healers at a time of various crises and bitter divisions across the world.

I have seen Grace perform at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, in a concert hall in Makati, and at various community centers here in the US. Regardless of the venue, her voice, music and performance will transport you to a different time and space—a utopian place of peace and balance.

Talk and performance starts at 6:30 pm in Sol Collective located at 2574 21st Street, Sacramento, CA 95818. Limited tickets are $10 general admission and can be purchased at https://www.artful.ly/philippine-national-day-association. For further information, please contact vince.filarts@gmail.com.

Bio

Born and raised in the river valley of Agusan, Northeastern Mindanao, Southern Philippines, Grace Nono is a Philippine singer, ethnomusicologist and scholar of Philippine shamanism, and cultural worker.

As a singer, Grace specializes in the contemporary performance of Philippine oral traditions with sacred themes taught to her by elders across the Philippines. She has been featured in concerts and performances in over sixty cities/venues in over twenty countries in Asia, Europe, and North America.

As a scholar, Grace has published The Shared Voice: Chanted and Spoken Narratives from the Philippines (ANVIL Publishing and Fundacion Santiago, 2008), and Song of the Babaylan: Living Voices, Medicines, Spiritualities of Philippine Ritualist-Oralist-Healers (Institute of Spirituality in Asia, 2013). She is currently working on her third book about Philippine shamans on voice, gender and transnationalism.

As a cultural worker, Grace founded the Tao Foundation for Culture and Arts, a Philippine non-profit organization engaged in cultural regeneration initiatives. The Tao Foundation currently runs the Agusan del Sur School of Living Traditions and the PAMATI Summer Encounters.

Grace received her bachelor's in Humanities and master's in Philippine Studies from the University of the Philippines-Diliman, and her doctorate in Ethnomusicology from New York University. She has additionally been taking courses in religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, music, and ecology from Yale University. Grace has been the recipient of fellowships and/or further training from the Harvard Women’s Studies in Religion Program, the Asian Cultural Council, the Asia-Pacific Performance Exchange Program, the NYU Global Research Initiative, the Asia-Pacific Cultural Center for UNESCO, and the Asian Institute of Management's Managing the Arts Program.

To date, Grace has won 45 awards for her artistic and cultural contributions. For further information, please visit http://gracenono.com/