SOZO Expands As A Cultural Impact Hub
Contemporary Arts Agency Celebrates 10 Years of Artist Empowerment & Cultural Innovation
Marc Bamuthi Joseph Joins as Chief of Impact
January 12, 2026
6 MIN READ
From left: Ichun Yeh, Rika Iino, Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Photo by Nino Fernandez.
Oakland, CA / New York, NY — SOZO Impact Inc. today announced its expansion as a global cultural impact hub, introducing a first-of-its-kind integrated nonprofit model that brings together artist incubation, global representation, and an impact accelerator under one roof. Built on more than a decade of strategic growth and artist-centered practice, and operating bi-coastally from Oakland, California, and New York City, SOZO aligns its business-forward track record with a public mission to ensure that artist empowerment and cultural innovation move in lockstep. As the arts sector in the United States grapples with deepening uncertainty, SOZO is advancing new ways for artists to sustain their livelihoods, take risks, reach wider publics, and extend the impact of their work.
Over the past ten years, SOZO has supported more than 1,000 artist engagements and generated 150 commissioned works in 300+ cities globally, with over $17 million paid directly to artists—experience that has shaped the organization’s understanding of what artists need to sustain their work over time. “For over two decades, I’ve worked alongside artists who generate extraordinary cultural value while carrying disproportionate personal and financial risk,” said Rika Iino, Founder & CEO of SOZO Impact. “SOZO was founded to challenge this paradigm by designing a connective landscape that fills systemic gaps in artist support. The question isn’t whether artists create value—they already do. The real question is what can empowered artists make possible? Our responsibility is to build the infrastructure that supports their labor, leadership, and imagination toward positive social outcomes.”
This expansion coincides with the formation of an executive leadership team:
Rika Iino, Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Ichun Yeh, Chief of Revenue & Creative Ventures
Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Chief of Impact
Together, the team brings a wealth of experience across artist management, creative production, and cultural leadership—working fluidly across entrepreneurial practice, major institutions, and cross-sector partnerships. “I’ve spent more than 20 years witnessing, facilitating, and excelling in the role of creative hybridity. On the spectrum from nimble nonprofit start-up to mammoth cultural arts centers,” said Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Chief of Impact. “SOZO is the organizational fit I’ve been aspiring to my entire career. Under Rika Iino’s leadership, I feel moved to both make art that imagines empathy as a civic technology and also create strategic modules that position creatives as leaders of the post-fear economy. I’m honored to expand my collaboration with SOZO as its Chief of Impact and anticipate reaching new levels in my performance-based practice, while co-creating new vectors of infrastructure for the public imagination.”
“SOZO has forged a distinctive path that proves creative work and innovation can be legible, investable, and artist-centered at the same time,” said Ichun Yeh, Chief of Revenue & Creative Ventures. “We champion singular talents and unlock unrealized potential across visibility, revenue, and long-term sustainability. As SOZO enters its second decade, we’re continuing to produce and represent ambitious artistic ventures—projects with aesthetic rigor and cultural consequence—while building economic models that artists can actually rely on. This expansion under a nonprofit structure allows us to stop working across siloed systems. Artistic excellence, ethical partnership, and financial sustainability now reinforce one another by design.”
A Decade of Proven Work
SOZO Impact evolves from the decade-plus track record of Sozo Artists Inc., a for-profit artist management and creative producing agency founded by Rika Iino in 2014, which has represented and produced the work of globally recognized artists at the intersection of contemporary performance, technology, and social inquiry in partnership with leading cultural and philanthropic institutions, brand partners, civic entities and community organizations. Recent and current SOZO productions include Lincoln Center-commissioned The Dream Machine Experience, an Afrofuturist AR/VR/AI immersive experience by musician Nona Hendryx, Earth.Speaks, a land-based public healing project by Osage body and earth artist brooke smiley, and Sonic Trails, a series of place-based smartphone app experiences grounded in community co-creation. Artists whose bold innovation defies artistic boundaries have found a long term home in SOZO, including AI voice pioneer Harry Yeff aka Reeps100, Emmy-winning composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, the GRAMMY-winning Alphabet Rockers, vertical dance innovator BANDALOOP, Taiwanese choreographer/inventor Huang Yi, and New York-based dance collective Ladies of Hip-Hop empowering women and girls. Most recently, the 80-year legacy dance institution Limón Dance Company has joined SOZO. 2026 projects include the development of a new bell hooks-inspired work, Tomorrow, Love… by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Daniel Bernard Roumain, and an intersectional environmental short film project by BANDALOOP and drag queen Pattie Gonia.
About SOZO Impact Inc.
SOZO means “to imagine and to create” in Japanese and “to heal, to make whole” in Greek. Guided by both meanings, SOZO believes that healing requires imagining a different world and creating it. The organization invests in artists as worldbuilders and cultural leaders, shifting away from transactional and extractive models of creative labor toward a circular approach rooted in co-creation and shared agency.
SOZO’s work brings together three integrated practices: an artist incubator offering fellowships and coaching that support sustainable, long-term creative lives, serving 33 artists nationally, with a focus on the San Francisco/Bay Area; an international agency that produces, represents, and tours a curated portfolio of artists and projects across dance, music, technology, and social impact; and a national impact accelerator that develops place-based impact producing initiatives with artists, institutions, civic partners, and brands to connect creative work with public engagement, wellness, and community life.
SOZO collaborates with a growing network of philanthropic partners committed to creative labor, innovation, and empathic futures. Current partners include the Mellon Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rainin Foundation, Gerbode Foundation, InMaat Foundation, Deloitte, and others. These partners enable a diversified redistributive revenue approach that supports creative risk while strengthening organizational sustainability.
SOZO Leadership Biographies
From left: Ichun Yeh, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Rika Iino. Photo by Nino Fernandez.
Rika Iino — Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Raised across three continents, Rika brings a global lens to building artist-centered systems of cultural production. A creative producer and entrepreneur, she is known for advancing artists as change agents through ambitious cultural projects. She is the co-chair of Building Ethical and Equitable Partnership, a national initiative on fair contracting, and the first woman of color to receive the Patrick Hayes Award for transformative leadership from the International Society for the Performing Arts. In 2023, she received the CALI Catalyst Award from the Center for Cultural Innovation. In 2024 she was awarded a certification in Nonprofit Management and Leadership Strategies from Harvard Kennedy School. She is currently the lead designer for SOZO Fellowship, a groundbreaking artist entrepreneurship and sustainability program.
Ichun Yeh — Chief of Revenue & Creative Ventures
Ichun Yeh is a producer and strategist with deep expertise in global touring, artist representation, and cross-sector partnership development, centering on future-facing contemporary practices that integrate technology. At SOZO, she leads revenue strategy and creative ventures, aligning artistic ambition with durable economic models. Ichun has worked extensively with artists, cultural institutions, and corporate partners to expand visibility, unlock new income streams, and support long-term creative sustainability. Most recently she served as the executive producer for The Dream Machine Experience by Nona Hendryx, the first-ever mixed reality experience at Lincoln Center.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph — Chief of Impact
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is an internationally recognized spoken word artist, librettist, speaker, and cultural leader whose work explores art as a civic and social force. A TED Global Fellow, Emerson Collective Dial Fellow, recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice Initiative, and honoree of the United States Rockefeller Fellowship, Bamuthi’s creative practice spans opera, orchestral works, dance and screen, with commissions from institutions including the LA Philharmonic, the Washington National Opera, and many more. Alongside his artistic work, Bamuthi has driven organizational strategy through senior leadership roles at major cultural institutions, including formally the Kennedy Center, where he was the VP and Artistic Director of Social Impact. At SOZO, Bamuthi guides impact strategy, supporting artist-led work that strengthens public imagination, belonging, and long-term cultural vitality.
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