Liza Meli owns and operates BarMeli69, a Mediterranean Restaurant & Wine Bar she opened in 2014. Through our conversation, Liza shares a glimpse of her 30+ years in the restaurant industry and her approach to her latest project. She offers an image of herself as a woman who knows who she is, what she wants and is actively & creatively living out her personal vision.

We talk about passion being a foundation to build upon, approaching work as a lifestyle rather than an endeavor compartmentalized from life, being willing to lose in order to gain, trying & failing rather than regretting, how to stay relevant & inspired, owning her role as a female restauranteur and more. 

Liza, raised in Sydney, Australia and of Greek descent, dedicated herself to travel, dance & music from the 90s to the early 2000s. She toured with her then-husband Flamenco guitarist Alex Fox as his agent, dancer and producer. 

Following the challenges of a growing family while traveling and an amicable separation from Fox, she rooted herself in Miami, Florida and pursued her passion for food & wine.

Liza is no stranger to the restaurant business, getting her first taste of the industry by working at her uncle’s popular Greek seafood restaurant at the age of 15. She owned Ouzo’s Greek Taverna in North Beach and Anise Mediterranean Taverna on the Miami River before opening BarMeli69.

At the end of 2018, ceramic artist Kira Tippenhauer found herself signing the lease of her very own ceramic studio, a vision she hadn’t planned on realizing any time soon. She shares what lead her to open a space sooner rather than later and how her experience called into question her own resilience, sense of worth and abilities.

We cover a number of things including embracing the imperfect, intuition, self-forgiveness & awareness, creating literal and figurative spaces for ourselves, knowing when to work and when to rest and more.

Kira Tippenhauer is an artist and the owner of Kiramade, a design line of modern, handmade ceramic homeware inspired by her Afro-Caribbean roots and Haitian heritage.

Kira moved to Miami from Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 2004. Since earning her MFA in Visual Arts from Miami International University of Art & Design in 2011, she continues to exhibit her collage work and ceramics locally and abroad.

Kira incorporates collaborative teaching in her art practice, offering ceramic workshops and classes to people of all ages through her business.

Kidnapped for Dinner recently partnered with Baiser Beauty to host Woman & Woman, a craft fair celebrating Miami’s up-and-coming women creatives through an intimate, indoor market and special programming, including a live recording of the show with community organizer and artist Niki Franco.

Our conversation focused on women’s insecurity, sense of lack vs love, shame and other themes factoring into self-worth and how we show up for ourselves and others. 

While placing these themes within a larger social and political context, we covered specifics such as non-commercial practices of self-love and care, intention as a kind of freedom, the power of community in healing and reimagining our environment and showing up in all relationships in more loving, honest ways.

Niki is a Miami Native of Puerto Rican and Panamanian heritage. As a community organizer, her work addresses issues surrounding systems of power and oppressive narratives and upholds reproductive justice, holistic health and building community.

She is the Political Education Director of (F)empower and Civic Engagement Organizer at Power U Center for Social Change.

Trust, ego, chemistry, playing off of strengths & weaknesses, preserving & sharing ideas and empowering your peers — just a few things we cover with singer-songwriters Nick Mencia and Oly in our conversation about creative partnerships and collaborations. 

Nick and Oly are members of the newly-formed country supergroup Nick County & The Rainbow Smoke, which includes the respective talents of musicians Rick Moon, Jorge Graupera, Corey Perez, Juan Ledesma and Jason Mavila. 

Oly is a singer-songwriter, DJ and founder of Let’s Sang, a classic karaoke event for music nerds at Wynwood bar, Gramps. She also organizes LASH Wynwood, a female DJ collective. 

Nick Mencia is a singer-songwriter, UX designer and self-proclaimed Chihuahua lover. He released his first album, In the Valley of the Red Sun as Nick County in 2017.

How do you define yourself? Is it limiting to try? Should you stick to one interest and run with it, or do as much as you can? How do you know which opportunities are worth pursuing?

We entertain these questions with Willie Avendano, while discussing how he fell into co-founding 01 in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District, a prototyping lab and studio for new educational ideas and products in technology and gaming.

Willie has a range of interests and creative pursuits including virtual reality, artificial intelligence, education, art and music. As a new media artist, Willie has exhibited video & sound work at &gallery, Locust Projects and the Institute of Contemporary Art and DJs under monikers Yung Algebra and Drake Tears. He graduated from Columbia University in Operations Research and Computer Science.

Yaima Arbona Bello and Maudie Valero founded their arts organization PAXy without prior experience and in spite of other people’s skepticism and the red tape of starting a non-profit and securing funding, among other challenges. Due in part to adaptability while remaining committed to their original creative vision for the org, as well as a spirit of collaboration, they’ve seen steady growth since starting in 2015.

PAXy, which stands for “Putting Art in the galaXy,” is a non-profit organization connecting diverse communities through accessible arts programming and outreach. Their main community project, Wake Up Miami!, brings art into the everyday by offering free, live music and performing arts at Miami Metrorail & Metromover stations. Their first “mini concert” was with musician Ominé Eager.

Wake Up Miami! was awarded a $50,000 Knight Arts Challenge grant for their 2018 programming.

While some may take film and other analog media for granted, Barron Sherer immerses himself in it. He talks about how working with moving images can be a precarious act of using and maintaining technology that today could be considered “obsolete,” and more.

Barron is a time-based media artist and principal at Obsolete Media Miami (OMM). His background as film archivist, researcher and curator informs his art practice of altering and repurposing sound and moving images. As a 2017 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellow, Barron has curated and co-produced various film programs and festivals for local cinemas, art spaces and moving image archives.

In 2015, he co-founded OMM with artist and cultural producer Kevin Arrow as an experimental archive and art project that invites media makers to repurpose their material. OMM presents these materials in new contexts through performances, collaborations and workshops.

Journalism is not for the faint of heart, especially as a freelancer. Christian Portilla walks us through the highs and lows of developing her journalism career all while maintaining a sense of gratitude and passion. Beyond pitching stories, Christian illustrates the importance of independence, motivation, finding your worth beyond the glamour of working for any one publication or institution, having a solid support system and more.

Christian is a journalist focused on diverse, culturally rich stories relevant to the South Florida community and abroad. She is a regular contributor to a variety of publications, including the Miami Herald and Miami New Times, and hosts a weekly radio show called Meet Them Mondays. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication and Journalism from Florida International University.

Cristina Nosti, the Director of Events and Marketing at Books & Books, speaks about the chaos and magic of working in a small business; the challenges of fulfilling a demanding role that requires energy and creativity while carving out time for personal projects; the proximity of death as one ages and its effect on sense of time, security and being; and more in this episode.

In addition to her role at Books & Books, a locally-owned independent bookseller and celebrated community center spanning nine locations, Cristina is a board member of the CINTAS Foundation, which recognizes creative accomplishments and encourages the development of Cuban artists in architecture and design, literature, music composition and visual arts.

Jason Fitzroy Jeffers has made a few leaps of faith in his life, including quitting his job at an established newspaper without knowing what would come next; taking time to develop his music career and, inspired by a Reddit thread on tire machèt he found in the midst of a depression, making a short film without prior experience.

As Jason shares these "leaps," a few threads emerge in our conversation: trusting yourself and what you love, even if the outcome may be unclear; fueling conversations about what the Caribbean is and how it is depicted in popular consciousness; challenging (resisting, even) what is presented on different digital media platforms in today's social and political climate; and questioning why people have trouble being vulnerable and intimate with one another.   

Jason is a writer, filmmaker, journalist and musician who hails from Barbados. Above all, he is a passionate storyteller focused on the Caribbean experience and diaspora. 

He produced and co-wrote, with Keisha Rae Witherspoon, the award-winning and internationally celebrated short film, Papa Machete. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014 and at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015 and has since been featured in a number of respected film festivals and platforms such as NPR and the Associated Press. He also produced Swimming in Your Skin Again and Dolfun, two short films featured at Sundance 2016. 

Jason is a founding member and director of Third Horizon, a media company, film festival and Miami-Based film collective of Caribbean artists, musicians and filmmakers. 

His most recent endeavor, Foggy Windows, is a “podcast and party decoding the mysteries of love through the history of sweet, sappy R&B.”