Born in the USA, crafted from scorching hot Southern plantation soil, and pushed up North, Rickyah Blake is a New Yorker born in the Midwest working as an Afro-Amerikana storyteller. She transforms the ancestral practice of storytelling and adopt it as a performance method. Through performance, she reflects and rediscovers the world around her reclaiming the stories told to her. The oral practice of sharing knowledge challenges the Western record-keeping methods that often tell a colonial history excluding the history of Black/African ancient empires long before it. Departing from this one sided narrative, Rickyah uses the pseudonym ‘Miss America’ alluding to an existence prior to her arrival on this Earthly plane. Miss America sees the act of story telling as an act of care by protecting the ancestral practices of storytelling. 

She uses the flesh as an elastic canvas taking the form of a character whose story she must tell. Painting this canvas with her voice box, blackplanet merge sound and performance to discuss complex subjects that include satirical gestures and dramatized scenarios mimicking mass media tropes. Combining movement, improv, and technology, her performance art challenges colonial images of Blackness, femininity, and power.