Toni Blackman[1] is an American rapper (specializing in freestyle hip-hop) and writer who was the first hip-hop ambassador to the U.S. State Department.[2] Additionally, she was selected as a 2006 Rhythm Road touring artist and subsequently served as on the selection committee for American Music Abroad (formerly Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rhythm Road) with American Voices.[2][3][4][5]
Blackman was founding director of Freestyle Union, a cypher workshop which uses a freestyling as a tool to promote social responsibility, was awarded, two prestigious fellowships. Blackman served as a fellow with the Echoing Green Foundation and as a fellow with the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) through which she launched Rhyme Like A Girl formerly known as ADI. A hip hop theatre pioneer, she founded the now-defunct Hip Hop Arts Movement (HHAM) while at Howard University in 1992. She has featured in the Hip Hop Theater Festival and she co-authored Hip Hop Nightmares of Jujube Brown with Psalmayene 24 as an ACT-Co presentation at ARENA Stage in Washington, DC. She is also a member of the Spoken Word Committee of the New York Chapter of the Recording Academy.[6]
In 2009, Blackman spoke at the Pio Manzù International Conference in Rimini, Italy, and in 2010 facilitated a groundbreaking artist residency at Jefferson Arts Center with girls from Liberia, Sudan, Somalia, and the United States. She also spoke at Harvard University as a part of Bakari Kitwana's Rap Sessions Series collaborated on and performed a song along with Azerbaijani rap group Dayirman, dedicated to victims of Khojaly massacre[8][9]
An interview with Blackman is featured in a scholarly article about girls and "bad bitches" in hip-hop online video culture written by ethnomusicologist and social media scholar Kyra Gaunt in the Journal of Popular Music Studies (2015).[10]
Music
Walking Through The Fear Feat Zo And Toni Blackman[11]
^Gaunt, Kyra D. (January 1, 2015). "YouTube, Bad Bitches, and a M.I.C. (Mom-in-Chief): On the Digital Seduction of Black Girls in Participatory Hip-hop Spaces". In Gosa, Travis; Nielson, Erik (eds.). The Hip Hop & Obama Reader. Oxford University Press. pp. 207 ff. ISBN9780199341818.