Bio

In 2001, Dyalekt was the youngest person to present at the Hip Hop Theater Festival with a rap & DJ interpretation of MacBeth that featured indie hip hop luminaries like Poison Pen & Tah Phrum Duh Bush. 

He’s old now. 

In 1999, he moved  to New York to study acting and law. He also liked to rap. One day the lawyers he delivered mail to, came into the office popping champagne bottles because they got acquittals for the police officers who shot Amidou Diallo over 40 times. He dropped the job and the law classes, pursuing the arts instead. 

Performances at the Nuyorican led him to Hip Hop Theater. He met Claudia Alick and was cast in her play, Six Hits, alongside Nsangou Njikam, D-Cross, and Angela Lewis, directed by Chadwick Boseman. He became an associate producer for Smokin Word productions, producing theater mixtapes of unfinished works, acting in shows like Yolanda Wilkerson’s A Musing, directed by Kamilah Forbes, and writing plays that were read and produced at places like NY Theater Workshop, New Perspectives, and the Downtown Urban Theater Festival. 

Dyalekt never really got along with institutions, especially inaccessible creative ones, so many of his works were produced in non-traditional spaces. The most consequential of those spaces was the classroom. When Dyalekt was invited to present at a workshop for New York SCORES, a soccer and poetry program in Harlem and the Bronx, his perspective on performance changed. 

Students are much better audience members than bar patrons, and Dyalekt found he had a natural affinity for facilitation. Hip Hopping with students like he did with MCs in a cypher led to better engagement, grades, and overall attitude toward school than the usual class. Dyalekt designed curricula that lined up the elements of Hip Hop with learning styles and identity through performance and rhythm. 

Through Hip Hop, or rather, by Hip Hopping, students could assess their tendencies and use them to their benefit. The community aspects of Hip Hop show students how to be responsible citizens, peer mentors, and advocates for justice. Dyalekt created a 6 week curriculum that linked identity & literacy, and paired it with his first album and one man (+1 DJ) show, Square Peg Syndrome, a show about a biracial student in detention after a race riot at his school.

He brought the show back home to St. Croix, rocking with 17 orgs and over 400 students. In the 6 weeks that followed, he asked them to interrogate their own identity via where they live, who their ancestors are, and what they like to do. The students produced 2 books of poetry, an album, and a documentary. He began working as a grant funded teaching artist, and from then on only created art that had an explicit educational component. He led classes and performed in “History of the Word” alongside folks like Utkarsh Ambudkar & Akil Dasan, rocked and led community conversations in Ngozi Anyanwu’s “Nike” and co-created the Hip Hop/Lincoln-Douglas debate program “D’Bate” with Claudia & Jesse Alick. 

His afrobeat rock band Deathrow Tull were the wedding band for Jesse Alick as he attempted the first gay wedding in NYC (before it was legal) with Chashama. The band also rocked the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where they D’Bated local MCs about Shakespeare. Dyalekt flipped the D’Bate program into a job prep workshop and began working with finance education company Pockets Change, and became the director of pedagogy, bringing the Hip Hop to personal finance. 

At Pockets Change he uses hip hop pedagogy to demystify personal finance and help students take control of their relationship with money. Dyalekt & PC are the recipients of Jump$tart’s Innovation in Financial Literacy award in 2022. His organization has its own award, the Hip Hop Finfest, where students around the country are invited to write rap songs about their feelings around money, backed by online lessons. The 3rd fest was broadcast from the Bowery Poetry Club to Howlround.com. 

Dyalekt conducts teacher trainings across the country to help them MC in the classroom and understand their own personal finances, and writes curricula for Visa, NYC DOE, FDIC, and the Ugandan Ministry of Education. He co-hosts the Get Shameless podcast, which discusses personal finance and racial economic inclusion, and was the poetry writer for NYC DOE’s WORD UP program, where he converted phonics lessons into relevant rhymes. His raps have also been used to teach rhyming poetry in NYC’s 8th grade poetry classes, and his best selling album was the multiplication charts with Ignite Learning. He even got to bring his performances and general Hip Hoppery to stuffy education and finance conferences all over the country. 

Dyalekt taught people at the Federal Reserve how to beatbox as a breathing exercise and his student, Finfest winner Breadwinna CJ was the youngest person to rap at the Federal Reserve in Dallas. Through all the theatery learningness Dyalekt was named to the Public Theater’s Emerging Writer’s Group, where  he wrote  the gentrification themed love story between a beatboxer and a deaf graffiti writer “Sound is Vibration,”  featuring Susan Heyward, Uzo Aduba, and muMs. He performed and led classes for the racism play/slam/battle “In the Cypher” directed by Patrician McGregor. 

His most recent soloish show is the Museum of Dead Words, where Dyalekt spent a year researching internet comments for the words that turned conversations into fights, made rap songs about how each word died, and linked with local artists wherever he went to build a guided museum tour. 0 theaters were harmed in the process, as most shows were at art galleries, or alternative art spaces. The Museum of Dead Words debuted at Mozilla’s Mozfest, and was presented at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s SLA conference, where linguists gave further depth to his findings and performance. During the pandemic, the show was brought online and can be seen in gather.town on the MuseumOfDeadWords.com site.

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