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WE OUT: The Air We Breathe is a program of music, film, words, and conversation grounded in the realities of environmental racism and the climate justice movement. 

The program features the chamber piece Found Again composed by Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate with poetry by Joy Harjo and a round table discussion with environmental justice experts Dr. Kyle Whyte, Christine Taitano DeLisle, and Julie Sze led by youth moderators Ling DeBellis and Connor Chaikowsky.

If you plan on watching and/or enjoyed the program and are able, please send us a donation. Every amount makes a difference!

All of AOT’s programming is free. In order to always offer this option, we need your help. If you are able, please consider a donation to support these continued efforts. All donations received go directly to support our hiring of local artists.

Victoria Vargas

Mezzo-soprano Victoria Vargas (she/her) opera credits include singing over twenty five roles for the Minnesota Opera and performances with Opera Theater of Saint Louis, Chautauqua Opera, Sarasota Opera, Ash Lawn Highland Festival and others. Her concert credits include performing with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (NY), Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (MN), Chautauqua Symphony, the Western New York Chamber Orchestra, South Dakota Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, La Jolla Symphony and Minnesota Orchestra. She has placed seven times at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions at both the district and regional levels. Her teaching credentials include being chosen as a 2018 NATS teaching intern and her students have been young artists at programs from Sarasota Opera, Santa Fe Opera, to the Adler Program at San Francisco Opera. Mrs. Vargas has served on faculty at the MacPhail Center for Music and Carleton College. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Voice at the University of Minnesota.

Alex Nishibun

Tenor Alexander Nishibun (he/him) is recognized for his "smooth-toned voice [of] spring-water clarity" (Boston Classical Review) and has been characterized as “a delight…” and “capable of stealing the show” (Portland Press Herald). His varied roles have included Nemorino from L’Elisir d’amore, Prunier from La Rondine, Fenton from Falstaff, and Monostatos from Die Zauberflöte. A frequent oratorio soloist, Nishibun’s recent performances include Handel’s Messiah and Dixit Dominus, Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri, Haydn’s The Creation, Bach’s Mass in B minor and Magnificat, and Mozart’s Davide Penitente. Nishibun is in his second season with the critically acclaimed Cantus, hailed as the “premier men’s vocal ensemble in the United States” (Fanfare.)

Corissa Bussian

Corissa Bussian (she/her)  is currently on the voice faculty of K&S Conservatory of Music. Corissa can be seen singing in the chorus of Minnesota Opera and around the Twin Cities with other local companies and ensembles. She was last on stage as Mimi in Theater Latté Da's La Bohème, performing the last preview right before the COVID-19 quarantine shut down. Corissa received her Bachelor of Music degree in vocal performance from DePaul University and holds a Masters of Music in vocal performance and opera studies from The Shepherd School of Music, Rice University. Corissa is so excited to be part of this amazing project with AOT and hopes the strong message touches the community during this important time.

Mark Billy

Native (Choctaw) baritone Mark Billy (he/him) is a Verdi baritone with a multi-faceted career in opera, recital, and choral work. Last season Mark was to sing the role of King’s Man in Minnesota Opera’s world premiere of Edward Tulane (covid postponement). Last summer Mark was to make his debut at Mill City Summer Opera, singing Marullo in Rigoletto as well as to cover the title role. Mark was a Young Artist with Hawaii Opera Theatre where he sang Figaro in The Barber of Seville and Marchese in La Traviata on HOT’s main stage, where he also covered Quinn Kelsey in the role of Germont.

Joy Harjo

Joy Har­jo (she/her), the 23rd Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States, is a mem­ber of the Mvskoke Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hick­o­ry Ground). She is only the sec­ond poet to be appoint­ed a third term as U.S. Poet Laureate. 

Born in Tul­sa, Okla­homa, she left home to attend high school at the inno­v­a­tive Insti­tute of Amer­i­can Indi­an Arts, which was then a Bureau of Indi­an Affairs school. Har­jo began writ­ing poet­ry as a mem­ber of the Uni­ver­si­ty of New Mexico’s Native stu­dent orga­ni­za­tion, the Kiva Club, in response to Native empow­er­ment move­ments. She went on to earn her MFA at the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop and teach Eng­lish, Cre­ative Writ­ing, and Amer­i­can Indi­an Stud­ies at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­­for­­nia-Los Ange­les, Uni­ver­si­ty of New Mex­i­co, Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, Ari­zona State, Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois, Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado, Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawai’i, Insti­tute of Amer­i­can Indi­an Arts, and Uni­ver­si­ty of Ten­nessee, while per­form­ing music and poet­ry nation­al­ly and internationally.

Harjo’s awards for poet­ry include the Ruth Lily Prize for Life­time Achieve­ment from the Poet­ry Foun­da­tion, the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets Wal­lace Stevens Award, the New Mex­i­co Governor’s Award for Excel­lence in the Arts, a PEN USA Lit­er­ary Award, Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Writ­ers’ Award, the Poets & Writ­ers Jack­son Poet­ry Prize, a Ras­mu­son US Artist Fel­low­ship, two NEA fel­low­ships, and a Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship. Her poet­ry will be includ­ed on a plaque on LUCY, a NASA space­craft launch­ing in Fall 2021 and the first recon­nais­sance of the Jupiter Trojans.

Har­jo per­forms with her sax­o­phone and flutes, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynam­ics Band, and pre­vi­ous­ly with Joy Har­jo and Poet­ic Jus­tice. She/ they have toured across the U.S. and in Europe, South Amer­i­ca, India, Africa, and Cana­da. Har­jo has pro­duced sev­en award-win­ning music albums includ­ing Wind­ing Through the Milky Way, for which she was award­ed a NAM­MY for Best Female Artist of the year, and her newest album, I Pray for My Enemies.

In addi­tion to serv­ing as a three-term U.S. Poet Lau­re­ate, Har­jo is a chan­cel­lor of the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets, holds a Tul­sa Artist Fel­low­ship, directs For Girls Becom­ing, an arts men­tor­ship pro­gram for young Mvskoke women, and is a found­ing board mem­ber and Chair of the Native Arts and Cul­tures Foun­da­tion. She has recent­ly been induct­ed into the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Let­ters, the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety, the Nation­al Native Amer­i­can Hall of Fame, and the Nation­al Woman’s Hall of Fame.

Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate

Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate (he/him), is a classical composer, citizen of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma and is dedicated to the development of American Indian classical composition. His Washington Post review states that “Tate is rare as an American Indian composer of classical music. Rarer still is his ability to effectively infuse classical music with American Indian nationalism.”
Tate is Guest Composer/Conductor/Pianist for San Francisco Symphony Currents Program Thunder Song: American Indian Musical Cultures and was recently Guest Composer for Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Balcony Bar Program Home with ETHEL and Friends, featuring his commissioned work Pisachi (Reveal) for String Quartet. In 2021, he was appointed Cultural Ambassador for the U. S. Department of State.
Recent commissions include Shell Shaker: A Chickasaw Opera for Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra, Ghost of the White Deer, Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra for Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Hózhó (Navajo Strong) and Ithánali (I Know) for White Snake Opera Company. His music was recently featured on the HBO series Westworld.
In addition to his work based upon his Chickasaw culture, Tate has worked with the music and language of multiple tribes, such as: Choctaw, Navajo, Cherokee, Ojibway, Creek, Pechanga, Comanche, Lakota, Hopi, Tlingit, Lenape, Tongva, Shawnee, Caddo, Ute, Aleut, Shoshone, Cree, Paiute and Salish/Kootenai.
Among available recorded works are Iholba' (The Vision) for Solo Flute, Orchestra and Chorus and Tracing Mississippi, Concerto for Flute and Orchestra, recorded by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, on the Grammy Award-winning label Azica Records. 
Tate earned his Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from Northwestern University, where he studied with Dr. Donald Isaak, and his Master of Music in Piano Performance and Composition from The Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with Elizabeth Pastor and Dr. Donald Erb. He has performed as First Keyboard on the Broadway national tours of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon and been a guest pianist and accompanist for the Colorado Ballet, Hartford Ballet and numerous ballet and dance companies.
Mr. Tate’s middle name, Impichchaachaaha', means “his high corncrib” and is his inherited traditional Chickasaw house name. A corncrib is a small hut used for the storage of corn and other vegetables. In traditional Chickasaw culture, the corncrib was built high off the ground on stilts to keep its contents safe from foraging animals.

Read a Q&A with Jerod

Christine (Tina) Taitano DeLisle

Christine (Tina) Taitano DeLisle (she/her) is Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities where she teaches courses in global Indigenous studies; Pacific history; gender, militarism, and the environment; Indigenous feminisms, and heritage & museum studies. She has published articles in American Quarterly, Amerasia, Intersections, and Pacific Studies, and a forthcoming book (Fall 2021) with the University of North Carolina Press's Critical Indigeneities series, entitled, Placental Politics: CHamoru Women, White Womanhood and Indigeneity under U.S. Colonialism in Guam. DeLisle's current project examines the fraught relations between museums, national parks, and national monuments in Micronesia. She has been involved in numerous public history and community projects in Micronesia, Illinois, and Minnesota: rewriting textbooks for public schools in her home-island of Guam; co-producing documentaries on pre-WWII CHamoru midwives and the revival of traditional Micronesian seafaring; and consulting with Chicago's Field Museum on their display of a 19th c. New Zealand Maori meeting house. She is currently involved in canoe revitalization and water stewardship and sustainability projects among American Indians of Minnesota and Micronesian diaspora. DeLisle is a former elected Council member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

Julie Sze

Julie Sze (she/her) is a Professor and the Director of American Studies at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’ John Muir Institute for the Environment, and in that capacity is the Faculty Advisor for 25 Stories from the Central Valley. She received her doctorate from New York University in American Studies. Sze's research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender and power; and urban/community health and activism and has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the American Studies Association and the UC Humanities Research Institute. Sze has published 4 sole authored books, edited a collection, and written over 60 journal articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, primarily in the fields of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, geography, and public policy.Sze’s book, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, won the 2008 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, awarded annually to the best published book in American Studies. Her latest book is called Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (2020). She works in collaboration with environmental scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists and community-based organizers in California and New York.

Dr. Kyle Whyte

Kyle Whyte (he/him) currently serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, the Management Committee of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, and the Board of Directors of the Pesticide Action Network North America.  He is a George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. His research addresses environmental justice, focusing on moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kyle has served as an author for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, including authorship on the 4th National Climate Assessment. He is a former member of the Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science in the U.S. Department of Interior and of two environmental justice work groups convened by past state governors of Michigan. He has received the Community Engagement Scholarship Award and Distinguished Partnership Award for Community Engaged Research from Michigan State University, the Bunyan Bryant Award for Academic Excellence from Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, and the Forty Under 40 Alumni Award and Don Ihde Distinguished Alumni Award from Stony Brook University.

Connor Chaikowsky

Connor Chaikowsky (he/him) is working on his Bachelor's of Violin Performance at Rice’s Shepherd School with Paul Kantor.  Originally a native of Baltimore Maryland, he was a member of the Peabody Preparatory and studied with Andrea Picard-Boecker. He has performed as a solo recitalist for the Violin Society of America at Oberlin Conservatory, with the Piano Guys at the Lyric Opera House, and at the Kennedy Center, Kimmel Center, and Carnegie Hall. He is a graduate of the New York String Orchestra Seminar and Verbier Festival.  In 2019 he won Verbier's Prix de APCAV for spirit of the festival and community engagement. Connor is currently working on a community and climate based project in Baltimore to be created in winter of 2021. He is collaborating with bio-scientist and creator of the UBeats Biomusic Curriculum Dr. Patricia Gray, hip hop artist, philanthropist, and entrepreneur Wordsmith (Anthony Parker), The National Orchestral Institute, the National Aquarium, and his quartet from Rice to create a set of musical presentations for children and young adults that use the connections between nature and music to educate on climate change. Outcome goals for the project include collaboration across organizations and fields, community-specific focus and relevance, accessibility for the audience of the presentations, and adaptability and versatility for the project to be recreated in other cities by other organizations. Through experiences exploring multimedia presentation of music, Connor has grown an interest in the possibilities held by pushing the genre outside of its traditional bounds, and the impact that it can create. He is actively engaged and committed to creating creative, community, humanitarian, and social justice-based projects, and making himself more versatile as an artist and activist.

Ling DeBellis

Ling DeBellis (she/her) is a third-year undergraduate at Rice University in Houston, TX, studying Evolutionary Biology (B.S.) and Visual Arts (B.A.). Her passion is to combine art + science in meaningful ways, bridging the divide between creativity and analysis. She currently conducts research with Dr. Caroline Masiello, and aims to estimate the ecosystem oxidative ratio in a boreal peatland ecosystem under simulated climate change at the SPRUCE Experiment in Grand Rapids, MN. Ling’s research offers crucial insights to tracking ecosystem shifts as well as tracking the fate of anthropogenic fossil fuels. She is the recipient of a NSF Multi-Scale Biomolecular Networks (BioNetworks) REU grant to continue her climate change research for the 2021 summer. Outside of the lab, Ling lives with an undiagnosed neurological condition and uses a wheelchair to move around. She takes passion in sharing her lived experiences and life story, championing disability advocacy through an intersectional lens. Between 2017-2019, Ling served on the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota’s Young Women’s Initiative Cabinet (YWIMN), where she helped publish The Blueprint for Action, a 20 recommendation document that aims to better the lives of diverse young women in Minnesota state policy. In early 2021, Ling was awarded the Women Foundation of Minnesota’s INNOVATORS grant to produce, write, and shoot a narrative short film that centers around a young woman with a disability in the STEM fields. The short film project aims to rewrite harmful narratives by amplifying the disabled community on screen as well as showcasing the lurking gender inequalities in STEM. Going forward, Ling hopes to continue pursuing the intersection between art and science, whether that’s grad school, med school, or something entirely different!