MASTERS OF TRADITION

Project Rationale

This proposal seeks support for Masters of Tradition, a long-term photographic and cinematic investigation into master lineage bearers living in the United States—individuals who carry centuries, and in some cases millennia, of embodied cultural knowledge through music and dance. While migration is often examined through political or economic frameworks, this project approaches it as a cultural process: the transmission of memory, lineage, spirituality, and ancestral knowledge across borders.

Cultural and Historical Context

The immigrant population in the United States is remarkably diverse, with people born in more than 200 countries and territories represented among U.S. immigrants. Among them are master artists—virtuosos and cultural custodians whose practices trace unbroken lineages ranging from hundreds to over 5,000 years. These individuals function as living archives of intangible heritage, preserving oral histories, movement vocabularies, musical systems, philosophies, and belief structures that cannot be sustained through text alone.

Sociologically, they serve as cultural anchors within diasporic communities, maintaining identity across generations. Anthropologically, their practices represent living systems of knowledge transmission rooted in apprenticeship, ritual, and devotion. Historically, many of these traditions have survived colonization, enslavement, religious persecution, and forced displacement, yet today face erosion through assimilation, cultural homogenization, and intergenerational disconnect.

Despite their significance, many of these masters remain largely visible only within their own communities. They teach across Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Houston, and beyond—often in homes, temples, community centers, and studios. They are simultaneously ordinary participants in American life and extraordinary bearers of cultural lineage, challenging narrow definitions of American cultural identity.

Contemporary Relevance

We are living through an era marked by rapid globalization and cultural abstraction, in which knowledge is increasingly detached from the body, place, and lived experience. Lineage-based traditions of music and dance operate in direct contrast to this trend. They function as complete systems of knowledge, encoding history, ethics, cosmology, and social structure through rhythm, movement, and sound. These practices are not decorative; they are pedagogical and communal, refined over centuries to transmit ways of being in the world.

Within diasporic contexts, these traditions provide continuity where displacement has fractured historical narratives. They offer younger generations embodied frameworks for identity and responsibility, while modeling forms of discipline, intergenerational transmission, and collective authorship that challenge dominant notions of individualism and cultural ownership.

In a pluralistic society like the United States, master practitioners actively shape contemporary culture. Their work introduces alternative epistemologies and relationships to the body that expand the cultural commons and complicate singular narratives of American identity. Documenting these traditions is not an act of preservation alone, but a recognition of their ongoing relevance and their capacity to inform how a diverse society understands continuity, responsibility, and shared cultural inheritance.

Artist Background

As a cultural conservation photographer and filmmaker, my practice centers on long-term collaboration with Indigenous communities, First Nations peoples, and lineage-based cultural practitioners. I approach this work through sustained relationship-building, prioritizing trust, ethical engagement, and cultural sensitivity. This background enables me to work responsibly with master practitioners whose traditions are deeply spiritual, embodied, and often sacred, ensuring that their representation honors both the individual and the lineage they carry.