SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
All events take place at the Overture Center for the Arts, Promenade Hall unless otherwise listed.

Presented by the UW-Madison's Division of Diversity, Equity & Achievement and produced by the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives’ (OMAI), Line Breaks Festival brings the top new aesthetics in contemporary performance art to the UW-Madison campus and the surrounding community.  It has evolved into a space for the investigation of contemporary American culture through the lens of hip-hop performance.

Line Breaks comprised of a weekly performance/ lecture/ discussion series, where invited professional artists engaged with the local campus community.   This was sponsored by OMAI and tied to the Spring 06/07 Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Arts Institute Residency.  The project culminated in a final performance of student work called “Just Bust” – an event, which has evolved into our monthly open mic, now running for several years.  Line Breaks has since evolved into a week long festival that cultivates performance art by building relationships among and between industry –leading artist professionals and aspiring student artists.   In our commitment to create access to the work, all activities tied to this, the largest hip hop-centered performance festival in the Midwest are free and open to the public.

Founded by UW-Madison’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and a program in the Office of the Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer, the First Wave Hip-Hop and Urban Arts Learning Community is a groundbreaking collective of spoken word poets, emcees, dancers, singers, actors, and activists from across the United States, brought together as scholars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Using the pedagogy of traditional spoken word, movement and performance, the students use these principles of linguistics, writing, communications, social and political awareness as an additional learning framework for their major areas of study across the university. For more on First Wave and OMAI go to: http://omai.wisc.edu.