Kultur Stories 2022 — Guest Artists’ Highlights
Kultur Stories 2022 — Team

Gender, Food, and Freedom Across Three Continents

Guided by professional educators and artists with the assistance of college interns, young scholars from Sweden, the USA, and Kenya created digital stories that focused on three themes: Gender Identity and Expression, Food, and “What Freedom Means to Me”. Meeting weekly via video, scholars shared their perspectives on the themes through the lens of oppression and resiliency, learned about the lives of their peers, and found understanding among new friends around the globe.

We wish to thank the Charlesmead Initiative for Arts Education and The Shriver Center at UMBC for its encouragement and support of Kultur Stories 2022.

Collaborative Stories

A Virtual Dinner Party

If you were invited to dinner by a new friend and asked to bring a dish, what would you bring? Why would you bring it? Eating together is one of the oldest and most human ways we connect, and sharing our favorite foods bridges us to each other despite differences in language, culture, and gender. We asked young scholars to bring their favorite foods to a virtual dinner party and share their significance.

Day In The Life: Sharing Our Everyday Foods

In every culture across the world, we have our foods that represent our cuisines, our cultures, and our peoples. What, though, are the foods we eat every day? What we make after a long day of work, early in the morning, or out of habit without second thought? Scholars and teachers from Kenya and the U.S. share a day of food they love, and what it means to them.

FOOD: Dining and Eating with Different Cultures

If someone invited you to eat dinner, what would you say? How would they react? Every culture has its own customs about eating food. For instance, when visiting friends in Kenya, it would be strange for a host not to offer you something to eat. In Sweden however, your host may not offer the same invitation. What happens when you don’t know your friends’ food culture? How can you avoid hurt feelings without stepping on boundaries?

Freedom and Gender

What does freedom, gender equality, and food mean to our scholars? What is relevant and important may be different from person to person. Scholars discuss everything from voting rights to access to feminine hygiene products, sports, and the modernization of society.

Individual Digital Stories

Rage by Leila Anjili

Leila shares her poetry, her inner emotions and expressing some of her most inner dialogues.

Food in Baltimore by Kameron Shields

Different Foods of Baltimore by Love Jones and
E’Ryan Benefield

Baltimore is an incredibly diverse city of peoples and foods with a dominant population of Black Americans, as well as thriving communities of immigrants and their descendants. Kameron shares some of the foods commonly eaten in Baltimore. Like many Americans, his favorites include pizza, burgers, and fresh meats and vegetables.

Love and E’Ryan shared their favorite foods, including offerings restaurants and local flavors. The people living in Baltimore have tastes as diverse as the city with cuisines ranging from East Asian, to Italian, to Southern cuisines.

Freedom by Rehema Idd

Rehema explores the meaning of equal rights for women, including having their voices heard; being able to express themselves; having their thoughts validated; and owning their own identities. For women to be equal is to have the ability to carve their own future and to do as they wish without concern for what society thinks.

My American Story by Anjelica Marzan

Anjelica shares the story of her life as a Filipino American and how her parents moving from the Philippines to American influenced her life. In 2019, Anjelica’s decided to move to the Philippines while her brother stayed behind in the U.S. While the transition has been challenging, Anjelica is embracing the opportunity to learn more about her family’s culture and navigating as a person living in the “in-between” as an American and Filipino .

The Tomato (by Gail Prensky, aka Galen)

Tomatoes are a wonderful fruit, especially tasty in the Summer fresh picked from the garden. What other can be enjoyed in so many ways- whether fried, pureed into a sauce, sliced thick and enjoyed raw, or preserved or pickled for future use. The tomato originates in the Americas, but finds itself in the food of peoples all across the world. Find it sliced thick on a hamburger, surrounding pieces of stewed chicken in a savory paprikash, or in a refreshing bowl of kachumbari with onions and chilis. However you enjoys your tomatoes, remember all the delicious dishes around the world that you share it with!