Garden Party June 2025

Join us for a casual farm-to-table experience with live music, celebrating freedom through movement! 

Our featured artists of the evening:

• Chef Matthew Gaston of Sapphire Kitchen

• Dance Artist Jiamond Elizabeth

• DJ Kritsy La Rat
  
  

The cost of your ticket is tax-deductible and will go directly to sustaining our: 

• Pay-what-you-can Farm Market: Ensuring everyone in LeDroit Park has access to fresh, healthy produce. This is a matter of food justice, ensuring that nutritious food is a right, not a privilege.

• Youth Education Programs: Empowering the next generation of food leaders through hands-on learning, teaching them about the importance of food sovereignty and community resilience.

• Stocking the Community Food Pantry and Fridge: Providing a vital resource for our neighbors facing food insecurity, addressing immediate needs while working towards long-term solutions.

Bios:

Chef Matthew Gaston started Sapphire Kitchen in 2017. Sapphire Kitchen is a hospitality brand centered on health, food, and education. The hope is to enlighten and empower customers to create and tell their own stories and reclaim their sense of health through food and education. Sapphire Kitchen has two hospitality concepts:

• Lusco- A Portuguese dining concept rooted in the culinary history of Portugal and the global diaspora

• Green Machete (Limón) - A Costa Rican concept that focuses on the diverse landscapes and bounty available in Costa Rica. And emphasizes the cultural regions of the country especially Limón.

Kristy Chavez-Fernandez, known professionally as Kristy la rAt, grew up in the D.C. metro area with strong ties to her family in Lima, Peru and New York. Her work in activism, education and culture, with relationships at the core, led to co-founding Anthology of Booty and throwing intentional parties in D.C. with her best friends.

Jiamond Elizabeth (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Washington, D.C.. She utilizes choreography to spark spiritual transformation across all space and time. Jiamond brings uplifting, innovative, and intellectually stimulating mixed media work to the community in the hopes of eradicating global imperialism and protecting the livelihood of Mother Earth. Her passion for dance practice and performance was nurtured at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Her academic and artistic prowess earned her local recognition from the National Congress of Black Women, D.C. Chapter. She was awarded the “Shirley Chisholm Leadership Award” for her contributions to her school in the student council and performance. In 2015, during her junior year at Ellington, she received $10,000 from the DC CAPital Stars Talent Competition. Her self-choreographed solo “I Put A Spell On You” was awarded First Place in the district-wide competition. Jiamond is a woman who believes that artists are cultural archivists. Jiamond finds it her responsibility to make spiritually and socially relevant work. Her values grew strong during her undergraduate studies at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA. In 2020, she graduated from UArts and debuted “Balancing Act”, the first section of an evening-length work at the Edgewood Arts Center in NE Washington, D.C.. She’s had the pleasure to perform excerpts of her work at the Emerging Artists Showcase at the Kennedy Center's “Dance in the DMV” experience, “Artists at the Center” Festival at Seattle Center, and during the annual block party with non-profit organization Wa Na Wari of Seattle, WA. She is currently presenting a new work with the Dance Institute of Washington within the “Incubator Artist Series”. Jiamond is interested in preserving the wisdom of Afirikan/indigenous people. Her development of performance material is an offering to the great divine within each of us. Her intention is to choreograph time and space in which community members can experience high-frequency energy healing. The dancing body is a catalyst for spiritual expansion. Jiamond desires a world where every body is celebrated and granted freedom to exist in a world that is loving and peaceful. Jiamond is a published author, dance performer, educator, yogi, and tarot reader. She is currently based in PG County, Maryland and can be found studying, teaching, and performing dance around the city.