W H O I S L I Z A J E S S I E P E T E R S O N
L I Z A T H E P O E T : Known most for her exceptional poetic skills, Liza began her poetry career at the famed Nuyorican Poets Café in 1995 and was a vital member of the enclave of notable poets who were part of the “Underground Slam Poetry/Spoken Word” movement before it attracted television cameras and national obsession. It was this electric group of artists that inspired Russell Simmons to bring “spoken word/slam poetry” to HBO. During the mid-90’s, when this generation’s legendary poets were “spitting” on the underground poetry circuit, many of them began experimenting with music. Liza was part of that vanguard and assembled Ghetto Orchestra, a band made up of notable (now mainstream) musicians who brilliantly complimented her poetry and monologues. Liza’s poetry has been published in several anthologies: Vibe; The History of Hip Hop, Slam, Bum Rush The Page and The Long Shot Anthology. She is currently working on two books; her memoir Down The Rabbit Hole and an untitled collection of Liza’s monologues, plays, essays and poems.
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L I Z A T H E P L A Y W R I G H T : To date Liza has written eight plays and was a recipient of a 2003 New York Foundation for The Arts (NYFA) grant for her one woman play “The Peculiar Patriot” which had over 45 prison performances across the country. Liza also created a one woman “Funk Opera” called “Chiron’s Homegirl Healer Howls” (produced at the Nuyorican Poets Café and the Blleecker street Theater/culture project). Her plays have been featured in notable theater festivals and performed in various theaters, nationally and internationally. Venues include, but are not limited to, Brown University, Amsterdam festivals, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Joes pub, Aaron Davis Hall, Bam Café, New York City’s Historical CBGB’s, a plethora of penitentiaries across the United States, and several national juvenile justice conferences. In 2006 Liza was commissioned by Monroe College to write an original play to engage high school students in a dialogue about higher education. She created the play, “Lessons on The A Train” which was directed by Reg e. Gaines, produced by Arcos Entertainment Group and performed at many public high schools throughout New York City.
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L I Z A T H E A C T R E S S : Liza Jessie Peterson is a classically trained alumnus of the renowned National Shakespeare Conservatory and has been a student of the legendary coach to the stars, Susan Batson, since 1994. Liza has appeared in television shows, feature films and theatrical productions. Liza has performed her poetry on HBO’s Def Poetry (two episodes) and PBS’s Between The Lions (three episodes), a popular children’s television show with puppets. She also appeared in several feature films: Love The Hard Way (costarring with Pam Grier and Academy award winner Adrien Brody), Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, K. Shalini’s A Drop of Life, co-starring with Nandita Das which was filmed in Mumbai, India and Jamie Catto’s One Giant Leap: What About Me? where she was a featured and interviewed along with Tim Robbins, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Noam Chomsky and many others.
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L I Z A T H E M U S I C I A N : During the mid 90’s, an explosively rich artistic period in Slam Poetry culture when this generation’s legendary poets were “spitting” on the underground poetry circuit, many poets began experimenting with music. Liza was again part of that vanguard and assembled a band of notable (now mainstream) musicians and created Ghetto Orchestra where her poetry and monologues were set to music. Ghetto Orchestra has performed in venues throughout NYC, including the historical CBGB’s and Joe’s pub. Liza also created a one woman funk opera called Chiron’s Homegirl Healer Howls - the first of its kind. The opera is a funk / rock poetry musical that was produced at The Culture Project in 2001. Liza is currently work-shopping her latest musical show Down The Rabbit Hole which is a retrospect of her classic monologues and poems and tells of her fourteen year performance journey in prison. Her band Ghetto Orchestra accompanies this poetic and theatrical story with bluesy / funk / rock music. This musical was recently presented at bam café to a filled-to-over-capacity standing room only enthusiastic crowd.
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L I Z A T H E E D U C A T O R : Since 1996 Liza has taught creative writing, poetry and theatre to urban and incarcerated youth. She created and developed several workshops including the Urban Folktale Project, where her students created original plays based on their most pressing issues and performed it at several theaters around NYC. The project was so successful that it received a grant from Russell Simmons’ Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation. The Urban Folktale project has successfully produced three plays. Each play is a coming of age story about inner city youth trying to navigate through urban challenges and adolescent pressures. Her Urban Folktale youth plays include “The girl who thinks she’s all that”, (by middle school students age 8-12), “Chilling with the crew”, (by high school students age 15-18), and “Wake up call”, (by formally incarcerated students age 16-21). As a board of education permanent substitute teacher, Liza taught pre-ged english and social studies to incarcerated adolescent boys at Rikers Island as well as ged prep classes to teenage boys and girls returning home from jail at Friends of Island Academy (www.foiany.org) a non-profit youth development center located in Midtown Manhattan.
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L I Z A T H E M O D E L : In the early-mid 90’s, Liza lived and worked as a high fashion couture model in Paris, New York, Tokyo and Spain where she walked the runway for some of the biggest designers in the industry including Jean Paul Gautier, Byron Lars, Yves St. Laurent to name just a few. After several years in the international fashion industry she grew tired of being judged by her exterior and made the courageous decision to express her “interior” by finding her voice as an actress, poet and writer. Now, she is approaching fashion from the other side using her beauty, couture style and provocative social awareness to launch The Peculiar Patriot ™ 2012 Prison Pin-up Calendar.
