Please RSVP by calling 914-332-5953. This encore performance is free, but seating is limited! unFRAMED is an ArtsWestchester Free Arts Day event sponsored by the Hudson Valley Writers' Center.
unFRAMED is a one man play in poetry and prose
about life as an outsider in America. The audience is invited into the studioof the artist as he reflects on his life while painting his self portrait. We share his journey through the perils of adolescence, the pitfalls of racism and the struggles of finding identity and acceptance in his new country.
Iyaba Ibo MandingoBiographyIYABA IBO MANDINGO - poet, painter, writer, and playwright/performer of the award-winning show unFRAMED - is a native of Antigua, West Indies, who came to the United States in 1980 as a young boy. His earliest exposures to the arts were through his mother, a professional singer, and his grandparents, a tailor and a seamstress who first introduced him to colors and patterns, paving a path to the many ways of expression: drawing, painting, sculpting, writing and performing. Iyaba studied fine arts at Southern Connecticut State University and today teaches in and around the tri-state area as a Master Teaching Artist. Iyaba is a two-time Connecticut Grand Slam champion and in 2011 won Yale University’s Martin Luther King Birthday Invitational Slam, his seventh such win. He appears regularly as a performance poet in venues across the United States and abroad, including Nuyorican Poetry Café, Brooklyn Moon, and Next Door Café among others in the NY area appeared at Lincoln Center Outdoors (summer, 2012) as part of La Casita. Iyaba was the keynote performer at the 2011 Westchester, NY Poetry Festival. He was recently seen at 59E59 in Deb Margolin’s The Expenses of Rain (Laura Barnett, director). He is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, 41 Times, Amerikkan Exile and his latest, 40 days & 40 nites of write. His new novel, Sins of My Fathers, will be released in 2012. He was a New York Theatre Workshop Summer, 2011 Artist in Residence.Iyaba was awarded a national Percent for the Arts Program artist grant, as well as grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and multiple commendations from the Nassau County African American Museum. His artwork has been included in over a dozen group and individual shows in the tri-state area.Iyaba’s solo play unFRAMED is winner of the 2011 Excellence in Theatre Award from the DC Black Theatre Festival and has been presented all over the east coast, including at Philadelphia’s InterACT Theatre, as a selection of the 2012 soloNOVA Arts Festival in NYC, the 2011 Art of Justice Series at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in NYC, the All for One Theatre Festival at Theatre 80, NYC, the Railroad Playhouse in Newburgh, the Puffin Cultural Forum, as a Spotlight show at the DC Black Theatre Festival; at colleges and universities (York College, NY, Nichols College, MA, University of Baltimore, MD, Rider College, NJ); and the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow. unFRAMED was performed inside Sing Sing Prison. For dates and information please go to http://www.unFRAMEDthePlay.com. unFRAMED is being presented in collaboration with Double Play Connections and Doing Life Productions; Jane Dubin, Executive Producer.
