word of mouth
DEBORA KODISH
Philadelphia, PA
Tel: 215.747.7377
Email: debora.kodish [at] gmail.com
I am a folklorist and cultural worker. Since moving to Philadelphia in 1981, I have been committed to supporting the growth and development of peoples' folk arts. I was the founder in 1987, and the long-time director (through 2014) of the Philadelphia Folklore Project. PFP became a collective effort and a community resource: an institution working in partnerships to cultivate folk arts as tools for justice, power and self-knowledge. Over the course of 27 years at PFP, I was privileged to help support over 350+ folk artists and cultural workers in imagining and developing their own work in folk arts and social change, raising over 3.3 million dollars in needed resources. This was an important education for me: a path to collectively shaping anti-racist grassroots public interest folklore practices, and collectively imagined futures. This work continues. I was also lucky, during these years, to participate with Asian Americans United in co-founding and developing the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School, which opened in 2005. AAU activists and FACTS educators have been my teachers and I am grateful.
As a writer, facilitator, and cultural midwife, I work collaboratively and in multiple media to challenge established and problematic histories, and to revalue local people, knowledge, and culture. I am involved in community projects, advising/consulting, and writing on folk arts and social change in Philadelphia over the past 50 years. I am paying attention to radical grassroots / peoples' folklore history, theory and practice; critical folk arts pedagogy (how we teach one another what we need to know and be able to do to be decent people and to shape the future we imagine); and public interest folklore (folklore practice in the peoples' interest, for the common good).
This site includes a variety of kinds of writing. In 2015 I received a Leeway Transformation Award to begin imagining a book on the above topics (and this next 10 years!) I was also asked to serve on the Cultural Diversity Committee of the American Folklore Society. I had been an AFS member for 40 years. Some documents from my efforts on both of these organizing/writing efforts are included here, as well as past writing—traces of what got me to this place. Also here are documents from the first salon I held, on October 9th, to fulfill a public presentation requirement from Leeway, to support the work of other local people, and to take some first steps towards my own book/organizing effort on "Home Training."
Recently (2018-2020), I was cultural scribe and project support for Kulu Mele African Dance and Drum Ensemble's 50th anniversary project: Ogun & the People. We published a collectively sourced book on Kulu Mele's history and transformative practices. The company premiered the full-length dance-drama enacting a Yoruba pataki (sacred parable) about a world wildly out of balance. In art as in life: for 51+ years, Kulu Mele has been rebalancing the world with love. So many lessons and ways forward can be found here.