Hami
The Core Team
Dakota Camacho
Artistic Director
Dakota Camacho is a Matao/CHamoru artist born & raised in Coast Salish Territory who creates indigenizing processes by weaving languages of altar-making, movement, film, music, and prayer. Camacho has presented yo’ña (their) work on five continents and throughout Oceania.
Exploring the overlap between integrity, ancestral/indigenous life ways, true love, and accountability, guiya (they) activate a Matao worldview to make offerings towards inafa’maolek (Balance and harmony with all of life).
Weaving through languages of altar-making, movement, film, music, and prayer, guiya (they) generate moments of encounter with self, each other, spirit, and the natural world. Yo’ña (their) work enacts spaces where multiple worlds, ways of knowing, being, and doing speak to each other to unearth embodied pathways towards collective liberation.
Camacho is a Nia Tero Pacific Northwest Artist Fellow, Western Art’s Alliance - Native Launchpad Artist and the recipient of The New England Foundation of the Arts, National Dance Project Award, The National Performance Network’s Creation Fund, NDN Collective’s Radical Imagination Grant, & Creative Capital.
Camacho co-founded I Moving Lab, an inter-national, inter-cultural, inter-tribal, and inter-disciplinary arts collective that creates community and self-funded arts initiatives to engage and bring together rural & urban communities, Universities, Museums, & performing arts institutions.
Camacho holds a Masters of Arts in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor of Arts in Gender & Women's Studies as a First Wave Urban Arts and Hip Hop Scholar.
Camacho has worked as an adjunct instructor at the University of California-Santa Cruz & the University of Guåhan. Guiya taught their self-designed course “Performing Indigenous Worldviews” based in yo’-ña creative research methodology.
Jeremy N.C. Cepeda
Language & Culture Director
Jeremy N.C. Cepeda is a CHamoru Language and Culture Teacher, and Independent Researcher. He learned Fino’ CHamoru through his grandparents and a life-long commitment to elders throughout Guåhan, Luta, Sa’ipan, and Tini’an.
He is in his 13th year as a CHamoru language and culture teacher in the Guam Department of Education and an advisor for school clubs. He also teaches language at Guam Community College and serves on the board of the Guam Public Library System.
Cepeda has been invited to design and teach local non-profit organizations such as Nihi, Dukduk Goose, Ináfa’maolek Youth, & Håya Foundation. He has served as a language consultant for the development of the CHamoru Seafaring Lexicon, and Guam Community College’s Go’te Yan Adahi I Fino’-ta project.
He is the co-author, along with Dr. Carlos Madrid of the peer-reviewed article about the Garrido Document that unearthed the meaning of many archaic words, and word forms and serves as a resource for reconstructing sentence structures that are fading away. He is also the co-author, along with Dr. Lawrence Cunningham of the article entitled CHamoru Sidereal Direction Terminology, an article written for Guampedia.com.
His experience and insight is sought after by public, private, and scholarly entities in the capacity of teacher, consultant, translator, researcher, facilitator, presenter, editor, and master of ceremonies."