NorthStar Church of the Arts is a multidisciplinary artist led 501c3 nonprofit organization.

From the vibrant, multicultural city of Durham, NC, emerges the remarkable force of Suhailah Waheed. Suhailah’s fundraising journey began in her youth, sparking a lifelong dedication to creating sustainable support systems for those in need. She began by fundraising for her school and local Mosque, setting the stage for a career marked by empathy, innovation, and an unyielding commitment to her community.

Now, as a Development professional, she is focused on crafting strategic, impactful fundraising initiatives. Her mission is to improve the quality of life for communities marginalized by inequitable systems. She does this with compassion, efficiency, and incredible storytelling – empowering through access to sustainable funding.

Dany Calhoun is a Black Queer logistics and operations professional with a deep commitment to operationalizing care and creating equitable structures within diverse non-profit and progressive spaces. Grounded in values of racial equity, queer liberation, and disability justice, Dany’s approach integrates their technical and systems background with a people-centered philosophy that prioritizes community needs. They excel at crafting policies, workflows, and safe spaces for collaboration.

Matt comes from a long line of southern preachers, but he left his faith behind in pursuit of a wider perspective. He's spent countless hours in front of a crowd - from the North Carolina Boys Choir & street corner acoustic sets to session guitar work in blues, funk, and Latin music with your favorite Durham musicians.

Matt also has a reputation as your favorite venues’ favorite sound tech, the resident expert at The Pinhook, Transfer Co, with GSF Audio and more. He manages our cables and our team of techs here, advancing shows with care alongside a decade of experience in live event production.

Born and raised in the industrial hub of Dongguan, China, huiyin zhou 徽音 (they/ta/她) is a transnational queer feminist organizer and community-based photographer, writer, multimedia artist and cultural producer. A diasporic bird constantly up- and re-rooting themselves, they are currently based in Durham, NC, and NYC.

They work with digital and analog photography, text, installation, and performance with a relational, reciprocal praxis. Creating with intimate and tender sensibilities, huiyin explores themes related to queer feminism, intimacy, memory, diaspora, and community building.huiyin co-founded and co-directs Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective离离草. They are currently a studio artist at Queen Street Magic Boat, a surrealist artist-led space. huiyin is a co-curator at NorthStar Church of the Arts.

Nori McDuffie (b. 2001), born in Durham, NC,  is an interdisciplinary artist who engages in various art forms such as photography, curating, archiving, storytelling, and experience-making. His work is a beautiful expression of his love, admiration, and reverence for Black culture, tradition, performance, spirituality, ephemera, and the human experience. Nori aims to inspire, challenge, and encourage dialogue, self-exploration, and interrogation of the world.

TaMeicka "Ifasina" Clear (pronouns they/them/Ifasina) is a fat, Black, genderqueer 40 something “big kid” and philosopher who calls Durham, NC and Dallas, Tx home. Ifasina is the Founder and Artistic Director of Get Embodied Soul Movement, a leadership and wellness incubator and hub for fat, Black(IPOC), and disabled artists, healers, and organizers to experiment with and cultivate their genius. 

As a a spiritual artist, Ifasina uses many mediums including Black American dance styles, short plays & skits, collaging, essays, and prose to create art about embodiment and the human condition. They have over 25 years of training in the healing arts realm and just reached their 8th year of priestly training in the African Tradition, Ifa (e-Fah). Ifasina’s history as a community organizer and trainer informs their passion for teaching and often preaching, by accident! They spend a lot of their free time in prayer & contemplation and way too much of that time scrolling Instagram. As a self professed ambivert, Ifasina’s main goal in life is to find the right balance between engaging in meaningful human interaction and finding delicious reprieves of alone time. 

Kamakshi is an artist, poet, mystic technologist, and daughter of desire, mothered possible by the readying ground and thick air of coastal souths. Based in Durham, North Carolina, she is nurturing porches between desire and possibility through poem, placemaking, code, and communion.

She is a part of People’s Kitchen Collective (PKC), most recently shaping and stewarding PKC’s project in radical hospitality as radical survival — EARTH SEED; She is a Poetry Fellow at The Watering Hole, and past presenter at the Allied Media Conference. Her work has been shared in MoAD SF, BAMPFA, Black Studies Collaboratory, Omi Gallery, and soon, Oakland Museum of California. She is currently hosting Vaancha Vaakitlo: On the Porch of Desire, a seasonal series of workshops on desire at Queen Street Magic Boat. At NorthStar, she leads Sunday Service on third Sundays, offering creative and embodied practices for all the different parts of ourselves to come along (Pat Parker), for and as revolution.