HOUSE & HOME: A People’s Salon

Tiff Beatty is a performance poet and cultural organizer based in Chicago, IL. She is the associate director at the National Public Housing Museum and co-founder of House of the Lorde. 

​Tiff organizes and moderates dozens of cultural events and workshops each year and her work has been featured in various publications and media outlets, including Crain's Chicago Business, History News Network, Block Club Chicago, The New York Times, Ebony, Chicago Tribune, WVON, and more.

​​Tiff Beatty received the 2022 Roberta “Bobbie” Raymond Leadership & Innovation Award from The Oak Park Regional Housing Center. She was a 2020-2021 Senior Fellow with Chicago United for Equity (CUE) and recipient of a 2019 Field Leader Award from Field Foundation of Illinois as a 2018-2019 CUE Fellow. ​

​From 2011-202, Tiff organized and hosted Art Is Bonfire, Chicago's only bonfire poetry cypher at Promontory Point in Hyde Park, Chicago.

​Tiff is a sister, a lover, a daughter, and an auntie. She was born and raised in Tacoma, WA, where she experienced joy, struggle, instability, friendship, labor, and love. In 2007, she received her B.A. in Psychology from Whitworth University as the first in her immediate family to earn a four-year degree.

Patric McCoy, art collector, photographer, and retired environmental chemist, has been acquiring artwork — mostly by Chicagoans, many of whom are Black artists — for more than five decades. 

Patric's also co-founder of Diasporal Rhythms, a 20-year-old nonprofit dedicated to collecting, promoting, and preserving art from the African Diaspora.

Learn more about Patric McCoy and his collection in this 2024 feature in Block Club Chicago by Jake Wittich.

Photo by Jerry Nunn

Support SB2158

Laurie Jo Reynolds is a policy advocate and community organizer who has spent two decades opposing the demonization, warehousing, and social exclusion of people in the criminal legal system — especially focusing on solitary confinement and public conviction registries, extreme punishments that emerged in the punitive turn of the 1990s.

She coordinates the Chicago 400 Alliance, a grassroots coalition led by formerly incarcerated people who challenge conviction registries and housing banishment laws.

Robyn Mineko Williams is a director and artist from Chicago, IL. She is drawn to embodiments of memory, time, lineage, and our relationships with the traces left by the people we encounter. Robyn is the founder and director of Robyn Mineko Williams and Artists (RMW&A), which houses and shares a body of interdisciplinary performances created in collaboration with an evolving roster of dynamic artists and designers. 

Prioritizing public, malleable forms of presentation, RMW&A creates by intertwining performance, design, people, and place. Robyn’s work has been presented at the Kennedy Center, Harris Theater for Music and Dance, Thalia Hall, Jacob’s Pillow, the Joyce Theater, MCA Chicago, and more. Commissions include Pacific Northwest Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Malpaso Dance Company among others. 

Williams is a Princess Grace Foundation-USA Choreographic Fellowship awardee and an inaugural recipient of the Walder Foundation Platform Award.