Starlotta “Star” Milan is a professionally trained performance artist from Chicago, Illinois. A powerful and poised performer, with grit and grace galore, Milan will soon be distinguished amongst the most influential artists of her generation. In 2015, she appeared as a principal dancer in the film Chi-Raq—having been personally invited to fill the role by the film’s groundbreaking director Spike Lee. Milan is also the Director of Art at the Sister Survivor Network, a Chicago-based advocacy and support group founded in 2017 to amplify the civic voice of Black women and girls who have been harmed by violence and incarceration. Exploring the fluidity of human and cultural circulation within the confines of the transatlantic slave trade, Milan’s choreography contextualizes the continuity of movement from Africa to America. 

Milan seeks to transform food deserts into oases of physical nutrition and spiritual sustainability. Living in the plant based world for 20+ years, Milan felt it was her responsibility to cultivate a culture around food and sustainability.  RAW was formed as a curriculum and food experience to both contextualize and deconstruct the ways in which the Transatlantic Slave Trade forced a people to negotiate how they move and how they eat.