Awesome Baltimore Live Pitch will feature three applicants who will share their mind-blowing ideas in front of a live audience! Awesome Baltimore trustees will select one presenter to receive a $1,000 award. Audience members will have the chance to vote for their favorite to receive a second award. The event will be hosted by Michelle Antoinette Nelson with music provided by DJ Chris Brooks.
Awesome Baltimore Live Pitch will have sign language interpretation, supported by Lime Scooters.
The Awesome Foundation is a network of autonomous chapters that distributes small grants to forward the interest of awesome in cities across the globe. Six times per year, Awesome Baltimore trustees award $1,000, no-strings-attached grants to projects that make Baltimore a more awesome place to live, work, and play!
Michelle Antoinette Nelson aka LOVE the poet is an artist, innovator, photographer, and Founder of Brown and Healthy, a global health and wellness initiative for people of color. She has appeared on CNN Live, CBS WJZ-TV, and Fox 45 television as a multifaceted career creative who has dedicated over a decade to her life’s work to innovating for social justice, authoring books, curating live entertainment events, and writing for publications such as Baltimore Magazine and Red Bulletin. She has moderated narrative changing and thought-provoking panels for Labs at Light City and Afropunk and has been featured in Forbes Magazine for her work. Michelle is also the Founder of BE FREE Fridays, the longest running monthly open mic in Baltimore, and a co-curator and host of The Red Bull Amaphiko US Festival.
To Chris, music is a lifestyle that requires dedication and love. Music is a positive force in his life. It inspires his work curating lineups for festivals and nightclubs, his original music productions, and his work DJing festivals, parties and nightclub events. Chris has been a resident DJ at 18th St Lounge in DC (birthplace of Thievery Corporation) for more than ten years. As the DJ Culture curator for the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, Chris brought cutting edge music lineups by celebrated artists like Diplo, Questlove, Santogold, K Swift, Peanut Butter Wolf, Cut Chemist, Biz Markie, Wiz Khalifa, The Clipse, Nickodemus, Stretch Armstrong, Karizma, and DJ Spinna to Baltimore’s Artscape and Light City festivals. Chris worked as a record buyer for Music Liberated, booked international DJ sets for Red Maple, set up global tours, remix and licensing deals for Unruly Records and helped launch the historic My Crew Be Unruly events.
Ballet After Dark provides free dance therapy workshops to survivors of domestic and sexual assault, using movement as an alternative therapeutic platform for participants to start journeys of healing. Their curated self-care workshop and photo series will depict the joy movement brings to those in need of healing, encouraging attendees to reclaim their power.