Sekou (tha misfit)
A two-time champion of the National Poetry Slam Competition (2002 and 2003), as well as the winner of the 2003 Word Up! National Poetry Slam, Sekou's work has been featured on such diverse media outlets as ABC World News, Good Morning America, MSNBC's Hardball, twice on HBO's Def Poetry, Showtime's Crossover, MTV's Battlegrounds, BET's Lyric Café, Artisan Films' Belly DVD, NIKE's Hooptown, Oprah Winfrey's celebration of Maya Angelou's 75th birthday, P-Diddy's Annual White Party and several national commercial spots. He participated in two national spoken word tours, including Declare Yourself, the voting initiative founded by Norman Lear, which traveled with an original print of the Declaration of Independence and registered more than one million new voters. Sekou is also an accomplished actor, voice-over artist, songwriter, and music producer, who has received an impressive array of regional and national music awards, including Best Spoken Word Album, Best Hip-Hop Album, and Best Producer from Just Plain Folks, the largest music organization in the nation. In addition, he received the Los Angeles Music Award for Outstanding Music Video and nominations for Best Hip-Hop Artist. Sekou and partner Steve Connell will perform an original piece written for the ACLU members on Sunday night.

Steve Connell
Steve Connell is a powerful and inspiring artist who comes alive on stage and captivates crowds with his performances. Both the Hollywood and L.A. Grand Slam Champion (2002 and 2003 respectively) and National Champion at the National Poetry Slam Competition (2003), he is also the winner of the 2003 New Word Series National Poetry Slam. His work has been featured on such diverse media/stage outlets as ABC World News, MSNBC's Hardball, Good Morning America, HBO's Def Poetry, Showtime's Crossover, MTV's World AIDS Festival, BET's Lyric Café, Artisan Films' Belly DVD, Oprah Winfrey's celebration of Maya Angelou's 75th birthday, P-Diddy's Annual White Party and several national commercial spots. He participated in two national spoken word tours, including Declare Yourself, the voting initiative founded by Norman Lear. His work is also published in an anthology called Why Freedom Matters . Steve recently concluded the initial run of his own hit one-man show, 40 Days, to rave reviews and was named Best Solo Performance of 2005 by Entertainment Today. He was listed in URB Magazine's '100 Faces To Watch' in 2005.

Decadance Theatre
Founded in Brooklyn, N.Y. by Jennifer Weber in 2000, Decadance Theatre is made up of female dancers from the U.S. and Japan. Decadance creates hip-hop ballets, utilizing the 'vocabulary of hip-hop' to tell the stories of the hip-hop generation. Decadance was established to create a new outlet for hip-hop performance, and was created, in part, because women have not yet established a serious presence in hip-hop culture, particularly in hip-hop dance culture. Decadance is out to change that by taking hip-hop -- the style, the attitude, the energy, and the female dancers -- out of the background of music videos and into the forefront of the actual performance. The group performs various underground dance styles, including B-girl (floor power moves), popping (small articulated, movements of the arms and legs making the dancer look robotic), locking (big, cartoon-like steps), and commercial hip-hop (big, sharp movements). Decadance also incorporates graffiti, D.J.-ing and M.C.-ing into their work. In 2004, the group received an award for Excellence in Choreography from FringeNYC, and was nominated for the 'Audience Choice Bessie Award' by Time Out New York. Decadance will be one of the featured performers during 'Artists Perform for Civil Liberties' on Sunday night.

Roy Zimmerman
Roy Zimmerman has been writing satirical songs for 20 years. He's shared the stage with George Carlin, Bill Maher, Kate Clinton, Dennis Miller, Sandra Tsing Loh, kd lang, Andy Borowitz and Paul Krassner, and played a series of shows swapping songs with The Pixies' Frank Black. Zimmerman founded and wrote all the material for the satirical folk quartet The Foremen, who recorded for Warner Reprise throughout the Nineties. As a solo artist, he's released four albums, and there's a fifth, "Faulty Intelligence" due out in September. "I hope it gets good reviews," he says, "but mostly I hope it gets denied under oath by Karl Rove."

Alondra Jones
As a plaintiff in the landmark educational equity case Williams v. California, Alondra Jones fought to prevent the California state government from depriving underprivileged students of an equal education. Although an honor student, Jones, a senior at Balboa High School in San Francisco, CA -- one of the lowest performing schools in the region -- struggled to graduate because of the poor conditions at her school. Aside from lacking books to take home and not having access to computers, students also lived in fear of chronic rat infestations in the classrooms and filthy bathrooms. After visiting a suburban school equipped with computers, laptops, books and clean facilities, Jones realized she and her peers deserved better and joined a class action suit charging California with reneging on its constitutional obligation to provide equal access to education. Despite a multi-million dollar defense by the state, it was clear that the poor conditions at Balboa High School were impeding the ability of students to learn. Ultimately, the decision of the case changed the way California funds its public schools. Now a senior at Howard University, Jones continues to maintain that, "if you're being oppressed and you're depressed about it, you should have enough self-love to say something, because it doesn't have to be that way."

Hope Reichbach
In 2005, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced that it had created an expanded database of student information for use in military recruitment issues. The new recruitment database included a wide variety of private and personal information about every American high school student, in defiance of a 1982 law passed to prevent the collection of such data. The expanded student database included information about students' gender, ethnicity, and social security numbers. It included information about 16-year-olds, even though the 1982 law mandated that it only include students 17 and older. The DoD has also announced that it will keep the information for five years, rather than the three allowed and that it will share the information widely with law enforcement and other agencies and individuals, rather than keeping it private. Reichbach, a senior at Hunter High School, along with five other high school students, objected to the distribution of her personal information without her consent and attempted to opt-out of the list. When this effort failed, Reichbach reached out to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Although the case has yet to be settled, Reichbach and her lawyers at NYCLU are confident and believe that students' civil liberties will be affirmed by the outcome. A leader of several of her high school clubs, Reichbach says that the experience of this lawsuit has only further convinced her that, "It is important to be as proactive as possible. Young people should never hesitate to contact the ACLU when they are worried there are rights infringements." Currently, Reichbach plans to pursue her dual interests of activism and journalism at Wesleyan College.

Ronald Bilbao
After distinguishing himself as President of the Miami-Dade County Student Government Association and conducting a Student Right's Conference, Ronald Bilbao was placed on a District Committee to review the potential banning of the book Vamos a Cuba (Trip to Cuba). The book had been on shelves for years until an ex-political prisoner of Castro's regime raised the compliant that the book's depiction of Cuban life did not match his experience with the country. Despite strong opposition from its legal counsel and Bilbao's committee, the school board voted 6-3 to ban the book and proceeded to ban 20 other books in the same series. Believing that students have the right to have access to any educational resource, regardless of political content, the SGA joined the ACLU to sue the school board. After testifying in court, Bilbao saw a victory for himself and student rights and the school board was ordered to return all of the removed books to the schools' libraries. After the suit, Bilbao maintains, "There have always been those that challenge the basic freedoms and liberties that this country was founded on. But there will always be others that will dedicate themselves to preserving a true America, in its basic and purest form, the way our founders saw it, and the way only true Americans can still see it. That is the ACLU."

For a complete list of Conference speakers, click here.