- Cowriter / Director
Katja Esson - Creative Producer
Ronald Baez - Consulting Producer
Amanda Shelby - Producer
Ann Bennett – MIT Reality Hack VR/AR/XR Hackathon Team Leader - Cowriter
Rashaud Michel - Lead Developer
Hessvacio Hassan (development stage) - Tilt Brush (2D and 3D) Concept Art
Micheline Hess - Animation / Motion Capture
LaJune McMillian - Black Movement Project
- Sound Design
Ana Monte - Composer
Shannon Sea
Education & Inclusive Economic Opportunity
Liberty City VR
LIBERTY CITY VR is an immersive environment that recreates the sights, sounds and significant events in the social and cultural history of Miami’s Liberty City. Known to many as the Harlem of the South, the iconic Florida neighborhood is on the verge of obliteration by a multimillion-dollar redevelopment initiative that will bulldoze the original structures and bury the neighborhood’s stories. Without LIBERTY CITY VR, the experiences of living, working, playing and dancing in the streets and historic structures of this once-thriving African American community will be lost forever.
Participatory narratives span from the 1940s to the 1980s. We meet Ms. Pearl at different ages of her life, and she introduces us to distinct moments in the neighborhood’s history. Meet original Liberty City residents from the 1940s, who show us the six-foot-tall “race wall” surrounding and segregating the neighborhood; play with neighborhood kids in the 1950s; hang out at a trendy 1960s artist after party at the Hampton House; or bust a move at a 1980s Pac Jam Party, where the Miami Bass Sound was developed during the early days of American hip-hop.
LIBERTY CITY VR is a digital oasis of history and culture and a singular testament of an African American neighborhood that remembers past struggles and achievements, acknowledges current challenges, and creates space to envision a positive future.
The mission of LIBERTY CITY VR project includes engaging readers, participants and audiences who are concerned about the possible cultural and social losses caused by an expansive urban renewal project that will require bulldozing and razing to the ground the majority of buildings within Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood. By creating a space for true stories to live on and be experienced through authentic voices, sounds, music, movement, visuals and environmental designs that are gleaned from first-person interviews, historical research, archival media and comprehensive data analysis, we hope to illustrate the power and importance of diversity in the creation of virtual frameworks.
We also hope to engage with area residents, social service organizations, community groups, educators and local stakeholders with a wealth of storytelling resources that could help to foster community engagement, creative communication and cross-cultural discourse. A key objective of LIBERTY CITY VR is to provide access to both contemporary and historical local stories that might otherwise seem unavailable through other established forms of journalism, social media, historical records and statistical data.
By sharing stories of the individuals and families featured in the LIBERTY CITY VR immersive experience, our goal is to help empower people to tell their own stories of this often-overlooked Miami neighborhood using the voices, arts, music and cultural practices that grew out of Liberty City.
