photo credit: Pascal Bünning

Malick Bauer can currently be seen worldwide in the titular role of the first German Disney+ series “Sam – A Saxon”. (Disney+ worldwide on HULU in the US)
This entrance on the global stage also lead to “best actor” nominations at the DEUTSCHER FERNSEHPREIS & JUPITER AWARDS on a national level. In 2023 he also took on a dubbing role in the film TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES – MUTANT MAYHEM.
Bauer was born and resides in Germany.
He gained his first acting experience in Hamburg before completing his acting studies at the “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” University of Music and Theater in Leipzig. Meanwhile he played at the “neues Theater” in Halle. This was followed by 2 years at the prestigious Volksbühne Berlin and collaborations with directors such as Pınar Karabulut, Claudia Bauer and Susanne Kennedy. In the 2022/2023 season he moved to the Berliner Ensemble. In addition to his theater work, he can also be seen on German television, including: in “Frau Jordan stellt gleich” and “Wir.” For MDR Kultur he was the speaker for the contributions “Trauma Injustice” and “The Forbidden Rainbow”.

Salima is an artist and mother living and working in Berlin, Germany. She boasts a successful career as a Senior Marketing Manager working for idealo internet gmbh, Germany’s biggest price comparison website. Salima is world traveler, has visited over 20 countries and speaks 7 languages. She enjoys cooking, dancing, and any creative outlet – music, art, books etc. She enjoys spending time with her family and is excited to travel the world with her Minime.

Malik Nagorsen is a talented young musician based in Berlin, Germany. Currently, he is pursuing a degree to become an educator in early childhood education, with a focus on working with toddlers in early development. In addition to his educational pursuits, Malik is deeply passionate about music production, computer gaming, and digital culture, and he values spending quality time with his family.

Committed to breaking boundaries and challenging racial stereotypes, Malik strives to make a meaningful impact in both his music career and educational work. He believes that prejudice and stereotyping stem from miseducation and a lack of awareness and role-models, particularly when it comes to working with children. While working to be a role-model himself, Malik aims to inspire empathy and to awaken a sense of perspective and community in the people he encounters.

Bridging Cultures: A German-American Journalist’s Efforts to Showcase German Heritage in the United States

The Miami Dolphins faced the defending Super Bowl Champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, in Frankfurt, Germany, as part of the 2023 NFL Germany Games. This highly anticipated event, one of two games held in Germany, aired exclusively on NBC. To deliver comprehensive coverage, our team coordinated an extensive, multi-platform effort spanning from South Florida to Frankfurt, highlighting the international support for the Miami Dolphins and the cultural significance of the game. Months of strategic planning culminated in live pre-game coverage, offering viewers an immersive and engaging experience.
To provide a unique and culturally relevant perspective, we dispatched anchor Constance Jones to Frankfurt. As a German-born journalist and the daughter of a U.S. military service member stationed in Germany, Constance brought a personal connection to the coverage. Her involvement extended beyond the game, as she developed a series of feature stories exploring her own ties to Germany and the broader experiences of individuals born to military families in the region. This work highlights the shared journey of identity among thousands of children born out of U.S. military relationships in Germany, fostering a deeper connection between the game and its cultural context.
This initiative not only demonstrated the intersection of sports and cultural exchange but also served to elevate the voices and stories of those who navigate multiple identities. The comprehensive coverage underscored the significance of understanding diverse cultural backgrounds while bridging the gap between American and German experiences. Below, we have included samples of the stories produced during this comprehensive coverage to demonstrate the depth and breadth of our approach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuqcmJu1rXY&t=215s
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/german-culture-101-for-dolphins-fans-traveling-to-frankfurt/3147126/
https://www.nbcmiami.com/multimedia/from-schnitzel-to-pretzel-heres-what-the-locals-in-frankfurt-dine/3151265/
https://www.nbcmiami.com/on-air/as-seen-on/fans-in-germany-excited-for-upcoming-miami-dolphins-game/3036832/

Artist, Direct, Choreographer (Playback, Being Pink Ain’t Easy), Colonastics, DMSUBM, Karneval, Yo Bro, and Schlagerballett; Co-Founder of the German Museum for Black Entertainment and Music

JOANA TISCHKAU is an artist, director, and choreographer. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Dance and Theatre at the School for Performing Arts at Coventry University in the UK. During her Master’s program in Choreography and Performance at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen, she developed an artistic practice that interweaves and critically examines the discourses of racism, feminism, popular culture, and Black German identity beyond didactic approaches.Her works, including PLAYBLACK, BEING PINK AIN’T EASY, Colonastics, DMSUBM, KARNEVAL, YO BRO, and Schlagerballett, have toured widely and were invited to prestigious platforms such as Tanzplattform Deutschland (Munich & Berlin), Impulse Festival NRW, Wiener Festwochen, Radikal Jung Festival in Munich, and Brecht Festival in Augsburg. Joana is also one of the Co-Founders of the German Museum for Black Entertainment and Music, a research project and exhibition that sheds light on the biographies of Black Entertainers in the German-speaking world. 
In 2021, she was awarded the Hessian Studio Grant (hap) as well as the inaugural Otilie Röderstein Grant, presented by State Minister Angela Dorn and the Hessian Ministry for Science and the Arts. In 2024, she received the Tabori Prize, the highest honor in the independent performing arts scene.

mawu lisa project

In MAWU LISA, we aim to tell a story in afro futurist aesthetic and science fiction tradition, that makes the tale of the deity MAWU LISA tangible and relatable again – as it is an almost forgotten tale, and one that has been barely known and heard of in north-western spheres of arts and culture. As afro-german artists, Zoe and I are constantly confronted with the lack of celebrated and practiced Black History in Germany, and are deeply aware of the issues that can stem from this lack in terms of identity. It is very important for us to create this piece in a well-researched way. Therefore, we successfully applied for research travel funds, to get a better understanding and knowledge of West African originated spirituality and Vodún/Voudou practices.

In January 2025, both of us will be traveling to Benin, West Africa – to attend the biggest Vodún festival in the country on January 10th – in cooperation and with supervision of our Benin based cooperation partner – L’Ensemble Artistique et Culturel TOWARA.
In addition to that, we also just received the confirmation to be able to travel to New Orleans, LA, USA. As we are planning and mapping out the trip – I was wondering if there are any ways in which Zoe and I could cooperate or be supported by any Institutions / Universities / Museums etc. in New Orleans.

We would be super interested in having the chance to be connected with local artists who may have worked on or with the topics of Vodún/Voudou practice, pan African identity and Black storytelling to get the chance to exchange.We would be open and thankful of all kinds of forms of a possible exchange like this – may it be panel talks, workshops or else and also of course contribute and partake in anything that could create exchange for artist communities ourselves.

It would be very interesting for us to know if artist housing and/ or accommodation exists and is available for us through a possible cooperation with a New Orleans based Institution. We would be incredibly thankful and happy to learn about the possibilities of artist accommodation with institutions. It would also be very interesting for us to know if there are any infrastructures in New Orleans for short term artist housing. Our stay is planned for approx. 10 days in March and travel costs are already covered by our funding. If there is infrastructure for spaces that we could use to meet and interview possible scholars and experts, that would also be amazing.
We are open and happy to offer workshops and talks ourselves, if there are any topics of our expertise that could be interesting for the Amistad Research Center or the local (dance) community.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, we are more than happy to get in touch, find time for a zoom call or exchange further about a possible cooperation.
Find attached our Biographies and previous work, as well as more en – detail information about the MAWU LISA project and of course copies of the confirmations of the cooperation partners we already have for this project.
YOVO YOVO Memoire short ENG
Thank you for taking the time to take all of this information in.
With kind regards

Elisabeth Clarke-Hasters, BGHRA Consultant: Arts & Culture studied classical ballet and modern dance in Philadelphia, in North Carolina and at the School of American Ballet in New York She began her acting studies at age 13, and was a member of the Children’s Repertory Theatre in Philadelphia and the Poor People’s Theatre in New York. She was also a member of the Dance Theater of Harlem. She came to Europe in 1971to study at the Mudra school of Maurice Béjart, and danced with the Ballet du XXème Siècle. Before turning to choreography and teaching she worked extensively with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pina Bausch, and performed as an actress in the municipal theaters of Köln, Düsseldorf and Koblenz.
Clarke-Hasters has been a choreographer for the Salzburg Festival, the Burgtheater Wien, the Maggio Musi-cale in Florence, the Oper Leipzig, among others. She was assistant school director at the Arturo Schauspielschule in Köln, and school director at Die Etage in Berlin, where she also led the dance department until 2018. She has also developed several programs for dance in schools, specifically combining dance composition and STEM curriculum. In 2010 she completed her training as a per-sonal development coach and is presently developing several new programs, including a coaching program specifically for People of Color.

Sonya Donaldson, BGHRA Executive Director of Media & Archive is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Colby College. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Irreconcilable Differences?: Memory, History, and the Echoes of Diaspora. She has also launched a digital humanities project, “Singing the Nation into Being: Anthems and the Politics of Black Performance,” which focuses on “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” (also known as The Black National Anthem). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where her research focused on Afro-German autobiographical narratives. Dr. Donaldson’s academic research centers on the intersections of race, gender, class, sexual identity, and technologies

Keith Green is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Rutgers–Camden. Dr. Green’s main research and teaching interests lie in African American literature, with more specific investments in the study of the antebellum era, self-referential writing, African-Native American literature, and slave narratives. He has delivered papers on Nat Turner, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, and William Wells Brown. His current book project, Not Just Slavery: African Americans Write Captivity Narratives, Too: 1816-1879, explores the various kinds of bondage and confinement–specifically Indian slavery, Barbary captivity, and state imprisonment–African Americans experienced and recounted in the nineteenth century.

Rosemarie Peña is the founder and president of the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA). In this role, she has co-produced and hosted five international academic conferences on Black European Studies.Rosemarie earned bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and German and both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Childhood Studies at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. Her research explores displaced childhoods with a special focus on the historical and contemporary intersections of transnational adoption and child migration. Her dissertation, The Rekinning: Portraying Postwar Black German Transnational Adoption, is a discourse analysis of two historical documentary films.

Rosemarie has presented at numerous conferences and is a frequently invited keynote speaker internationally. She is a contributing author in several edited volumes published in both German and English. Her peer reviewed articles have appeared in The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood, Genealogy Journal, and the Journal of Adoption and Culture. Rosemarie’s most recent essay, “Black Germans: Reunifying in Diaspora” appears in Silke Hackenesch’s editid volume Adopting Children across Race and Nations: Histories and Legacies (Nov. 2023).

Amazon Author Link

Emily Frazier-Rath is an educator and researcher rooted in the fields of German Studies, Migration Studies, and Feminist Studies. In addition to her work for the BGHRA, she is also currently Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. She earned her PhD in German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder in May 2019, and her MA in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati in 2013. Emily’s most recent publication entitled To Be Seen and to Be Whole: Black German FLINTA* on Community, Identity, and Connection appeared in The German Quarterly in fall 2022.

Emily taught the inaugural Beginning German I class for Black German adoptees and their families in May 2022, which was made possible through the generous support of the Anderson Language and Technology Center (ALTEC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Emily’s current research centers on the pedagogical effects of engaging in transnational and transcultural dialog to build mutual understanding through deep, community-based learning in the humanities classroom. This work is informed by her collaboration with Dr. Rosemarie Peña in two courses they have introduced to the Davidson College curriculum: Black German Art & Resistance and Race, Gender, Migration.