Bio:
Caridad De La Luz is a multi-faceted performer known as“La Bruja”, who recently won the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship 2019-2020. She starred in the hit musicals DANCING IN MY COCKROACH KILLERS and I LIKE IT LIKE THAT.
She is considered one of America’s leading spoken word poets and was named one of the ‘Top 20 Puerto Rican Women Everyone Should Know”.
Caridad was awarded the Puerto Rican Women Legacy Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award for excellence in writing from The Bronx Historical Society and has been titled a Bronx Living Legend along with a Citation of Merit from the Bronx Borough President.
She was has performed in venues such as The Apollo, Lincoln Center, Gracie Mansion, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, City Hall and in venues internationally.
Since her debut performance in the famed Nuyorican Poets Café in 1996, she continues to host the Monday Night Open Mics entertaining the crowds with her comedic improvisational skills and poetic prowess.
N.Y. Times called her”a Juggernaut”after her original musical Boogie Rican Blvd. where she played 7 different characters.
She was awarded Best Musical for the 2015 production of Betsy where she played the title role. Her acting career has taken her from the stage to film: appearing in numerous movies including Bamboozled, Down to the Bone, El Vacilon and Gun Hill Road. She proudly played an extra in Ava DuVernay’s WHEN THEY SEE US, check in the opening scene of Episode 3 with John Leguizamo.
She crossed over as a recording artist with her albums “Brujalicious” and “For Witch It Stands” both on Spotify and iTunes.
Her poetry is featured on Prince Royce’s album “Phase II” and she is infamous for her piercing performance on Russell Simmons’ HBO Def Poetry Jam.
As a teaching artist, Caridad has worked throughout the country facilitating writing and performance workshops for countless youth and aspiring artists.
She is currently cultivating her own art space in the Soundview area of The Bronx called El Garaje and will soon be traveling the West Coast of Canada, Peru and Africa to visit Indigenous healers and expand her practice.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Poetry / Hip Hop / Comedy / Host / Actor / Teaching Artist / Activist / Mother / Healer / Puerto Rican Powerhouse / Queen of Nuyorico / Bronx Living Legend / La Bruja "is a Juggernaut"
- NY Times
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).