Street Seen - Incite at Columbia University

Incubated Project

Street Seen

  • Funding Program Assembling Voices
  • Timeframe 2023–2024
  • Location San Diego, California
  • Assembling Voices Fellows
    • Jason Ritchie San Diego Unhoused Collective
    • Frank Kensaku San Diego Unhoused Collective
  • Affiliated Organizations San Diego Unhoused Collective

The San Diego Unhoused Collective is a collaborative of formerly unhoused artists who create innovative art that centers the perspective of the unsheltered.

The Collective is represented by Assembling Voices Fellows Jason Ritchie and Frank Kensaku Saragosa, San Diego-based artists who have personally experienced homelessness and have since transformed their experiences into innovative writing, film, theater, and digital media.

Two men taking a selfie outdoors and smiling.
Frank Kensaku and Jason Ritchie.

Together, Ritchie and Saragosa create platforms for people who have been unhoused to tell their stories and seek to empower currently and formerly unhoused people by giving them the skills and tools necessary to tell their own stories and create their own art.

During their Assembling Voices fellowship, the pair produced an experimental theatrical installation titled Street Seen to raise awareness about the lived experiences of unhoused peoples and center the voices of those lived experiences, reflecting the collective’s larger goals of producing public storytelling, art, and advocacy to empower the unhoused community.

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