Passionate, authentic, humane, keeper of the culture, eMCee, spoken word artist, leader, coach, actor, dancer, arts educator, theater-maker, and now, executive director. Olisa Enrico is all of these things and then some! The Cultural Space Agency, the first Public Development Authority to be established in Seattle in 40 years, recently named Olisa Executive Director of the agency.
The Cultural Space Agency was chartered by the City of Seattle as a Public Development Authority to secure long-term affordable commercial cultural space with community partners. These partnerships are intended to build wealth through direct investment in real property, creating opportunities for ownership of commercial cultural space, with a particular focus on the needs of Black and Indigenous communities.
As Executive Director, Olisa will work with community partners who comprise the agency’s governing council along with community stakeholders, and will play a key role in realizing the dream of using cultural space investments to create community wealth through an anti-racist lens. It’s a tall order, but Olisa comes to this appointment with years of experience in her hip pocket, and a very long list of collaborators with whom she has developed trusting relationships.
Olisa is well-known in the hip-hop community. As a young B-girl, she earned much respect among those repping the 206 with her spicy rhymes. She is also a highly respected arts education specialist having served as the Co-Director of Education at ArtsCorps, and she is a theater maker, whose most recent production “Dispersed: The Womxn of Region Six," recently premiered at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute. As a community builder, an extremely collaborative leader, and a dynamic organizational builder, Olisa Enrico is sure to take the Cultural Space Agency to the next level of success in the name of enlarging the territory for arts and culture in Seattle.
Congratulations to Olisa Enrico! Learn more about the Cultural Space Agency on their website.
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