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Image: description: Potri Ranka Manis is wearing a colorful malong (Filipino dress) with a red scarf covering her hair. She is looking out with her hand gestured on a fire escape. Photo by Hamza Razuman.
she/her/hers
Munsee Lenape; New York, NY
Potri Ranka Manis is from Mindanao, the southern Philippines. She is an interdisciplinary artist-activist in diaspora, NYFA/NYSCA Folk Art Fellow, and resident artist of LaMaMa, ETC since 2000. She founded Kinding Sindaw Heritage Foundation, Inc. in 1992, a cultural non-profit organization in New York City with a mission to assert, reclaim, preserve and re-create the ancestral stories, unwritten history and living tradition of Mindanao indigenous peoples and sovereign nations. She is a tradition bearer, poet, playwright, dance master, teacher and choreographer. Her dance serves as poetry of the events she experienced as a registered nurse, mother, and Muslim sojourner towards the liberation and self-determination of the Mindanao Bangsa from foreign domination. She believes that tradition bearers have the obligation to commit their art to promote racial equity, justice and inclusion, and to amplify the narratives of the silenced. Potri upholds that if we remember the resilience of our ancestors, we will never be conquered.
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