Our Emcee for the Evening
Thank you to our incredible Tend! Corporate Sponsors
Meet Your Tend! Speakers and Performers
Jaimée Marsh (they/them) specializes in community organizing, organizational capacity building, and social identity development. For over 15 years, they applied this skill set to build community, shift power to youth, and drive policy change, particularly with/for queer and trans people of color. Jaimée is an alum of the University of Michigan and University of Washington Schools of Social Work where they deepened their passion for cultivating and curating creative spaces that center radical joy and healing, as well as fostering sustained partnerships between school systems and the community at large. Currently, Jaimée serves as Executive Director of FEEST, a non-profit organization that centers youth as leaders in changing school food systems in Seattle and South King County. In their personal life, Jaimée is a cheese enthusiast who loves cooking at home as much as travel and food adventures.
It’s rare for an artist to bridge the divide between critical acclaim and dedicated fan engagement. Chris Pureka is a Portland-based singer-songwriter whose body of work has resonated deeply with these seemingly disparate milieus. Her bold vulnerability in processing the intimacies of life in song has long appealed to those listeners who crave authenticity. Chris’s elegant emotionality as a vocalist and her flair and immediacy as a lyricist have garnered her favorable comparisons to Gillian Welch and Patty Griffin. She’s earned accolades from such distinguished taste-making outlets as The New York Times, Paste, Magnet, Billboard.com, and The AllMusic Guide. She’s shared the stage with such diverse and esteemed artists as Dar Williams, The Lumineers, The Cowboy Junkies, Gregory Alan Isakov, and Ani DiFranco. Along the way, Chris has remained fiercely independent, selling nearly 50,000 albums through her own label, Sad Rabbit Records.
Zoser is a singer/songwriter and music bender with a soulful voice, thoughtful lyrics, and a guitar. Music grounds Zoser as he sings his way through the Puget Sound. As an up and coming Seattle artist, Zoser began playing guitar when he was just 10-years-old. By the age of 12, he began penning his own lyrics and performing to local audiences in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia. Zo remained a fixture on the local musical scene until relocating to Seattle where he graduated from West Seattle High School in 2018. While in high school, Zoser was a gold medalist in the Seattle King County NAACP ACTSO competition where he went on to represent the branch at the National convention. He has been inducted into the Washington Young Laureates program and is currently the Co-Chair of the Totem Star Leadership Collective. Shortly after adjusting to the Seattle music scene, he went on to be a semi-finialist for SoundOff! 2019, a member of More Music at The Moore and the guitarist of Mirabai Kukathas’ band in SoundOff! 2020.
Zoser’s musical style cannot be easily categorized. His music shifts seamlessly between pop, folk, and hip hop with influences ranging from Michael Kiwanuka to Childish Gambino. A simple six-string, in Zo’s hands, transforms into a “beat box,” lending percussive bass to funky hip-hop rhymes. By culling and synthesizing seemingly disparate musical forms and influences, Zoser has crafted a sound that is wholly and undeniably his own. The result is something spectacular to behold: a voice that conveys a world-weary ache and a bright optimism, and a sense of musicality that is both rhythmic and infectiously melodic. He is a singer, a storyteller and something of a revelation – not necessarily a soul singer but something more rare and precious – a singer with soul.