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Tara Lake grew up performing. As a college student, she acted in university musicals and wrote, directed and produced her own plays. Her love of music, the spoken word, storytelling, and the stage never left her, and as a graduate student, she studied African American performance culture - investigating and lecturing on the role of Black performance aesthetics on America’s cultural identity. As a professor, she learned poignant lessons about the power of story, theatre, music, and image to teach and inspire students in ways mere lectures couldn’t. Soon she was right back where she’d started - storytelling, and hosting screenings, cultural productions, and student showcases that brought the concepts and subjects from her African American Studies courses to life. She friended the stage again, and even began fiddling with podcasting and filmmaking. Recently, she’s been a featured Musical Inspiration Performer at the Agape International Spiritual Center (Los Angeles) and a featured storyteller at The Monti (Durham, NC). That story recently won her the Hippo Award nomination for Best Overall Story and earned her a spot on The Monti’s first CD release. She’s now workshopping a one-woman play exploring the impact of “Reaganomics” on Black communities. There’s also a video doc in the works, “North Carolina Central University Archives: Documenting a Legacy at 100 Years”. Another project, The Aural Tradition, an ensemble performance series showcasing the oral tradition in black culture, is forthcoming. A version of her story “My First Love (The Blood)” now appears in the FIAT Alternate Routes Commercial Campaign. Tara Lake has been awarded the 2010 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist Grant and the 2009 Facilities Grant by the Durham Arts Council of North Carolina. http://taralakeshow.com/http://www.agapelive.com/http://www.themonti.org/file://localhost/Users/taralake/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/Tara%20Lake/Tara%20Lake's%20Album/Tara%20Lake.First%20Love.Monti%20Compressed2.mp3shapeimage_2_link_0shapeimage_2_link_1shapeimage_2_link_2
Performer.Producer.MediaNerd.http://www.yearofthegriot.com

Tara Lake.com by Tara Lake is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Artist

Photo: Kem West

Click play icon above to hear Tara at The Monti. Learn more about The Monti.

New!: Play Track 2 to hear a montage from

“The Monti Presents: Hippo Award Winners, Volume 1”, out Feb. 2011, featuring Tara Lake and a number of Monti Storytellers.