Photo: Maddlynn at Unscripted Photography. Maddlynn donated these photos for Juneteenth 2026. Produced by Angel Iset Dozier with Zeitgeist Gallery & Bar.

Since 2015, Be Connected Durham has used arts, culture, music, storytelling, public engagement, and interdisciplinary collaboration to address disparities, foster equity, support healing, and build transformative community infrastructure in Durham and beyond.

Founded by cultural strategist, curator, educator, and conceptual artist Angel Iset Dozier, Be Connected Durham emerged from a commitment made after the inaugural Black Lives Matter national convening in Ferguson, Missouri: to return home and build spaces where Black, Indigenous, and People of Color could process trauma, reclaim narrative, and imagine new futures through artistic and cultural expression as root medicine.

What began with a presentation called The Experiment has since grown into more than 500 community arts events, installations, performances, public conversations, strategic frameworks, and interdisciplinary collaborations—85% reaching sold-out audiences.

Angel Iset’s work bridges kinesiology research, education, public art, urban planning, curriculum design, Black cultural production, and civic engagement into what she calls The Be Connected Method: an artistically prescriptive concept and space programming practice designed to reveal what traditional systems often miss. Her work has informed public engagement models, community development frameworks, health equity initiatives, and cultural planning efforts across Durham.

This includes contributions to the Fayetteville Street Corridor Fellows Project, the Equitable Community Engagement Blueprint later adopted by the City of Durham, and the Durham Marshall Plan / Hayti Revitalization framework—work rooted in community storytelling, public memory, cultural preservation, and equitable development.

Through Be Connected Durham & Beyond, Angel Iset continues building projects that sit at the intersection of public art, public health, cultural organizing, healing justice, Black embodiment, and liberation practice.

Our current exhibition, WE SET OUR TERMS: Power • Consent • Liberation — A Black Erotic Praxis, is part of that ongoing work.

Centering Black artists and engaging Kink and BDSM through a Black lens, the exhibition explores health equity, bodily autonomy, relational repair, intimacy, care, consent, power, and liberation through visual art, workshops, performances, artist talks, and Juneteenth-centered public programming. It asks audiences to consider freedom not only as a historical event, but as an ongoing embodied practice connected to how we relate, heal, negotiate, protect, and define ourselves and each other.

This work is innovative, community-rooted, interdisciplinary, and proven. It is both theory and practice—the continuation of more than a decade of relationship-building, artistic experimentation, civic and public engagement, and cultural strategy designed to move communities toward healing, self-definition, and lasting change while helping cultivate a deeper and more expansive relationship to Juneteenth itself.

Your support helps us:

compensate artists and facilitators fairly
provide accessible public programming
eliminate artist commission fees
fund exhibition infrastructure and outreach
sustain innovative Black-led cultural work in Durham

Thank you for investing in work that believes art is not decoration around transformation—it is part of the transformation itself.

We Set Our Terms: Power, Consent, Liberation Exhibit

Consent Is a Liberation Practice.

Team Members