Janei Maynard

Executive Director

As founding Executive Director, Janei works to create a space where everyone feels safe & empowered to express themselves and connect with themselves & each other in her hometown of Aurora. She has worked in hip hop equity, hip hop education, and hip hop feminism, as a dancer, musician, and scholar since 2011.

Janei holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity with Honors and a concentration in Identity, Diversity, and Aesthetics, as well as a Master of Arts degree in Communication with a concentration in Media Studies. Both degrees were earned from Stanford University, where she committed her academic work to 1) exploring how hip hop is a unique medium through which low-income, youth of color, specifically Black girls, can tell their stories and connect with themselves, their experiences, and their communities and 2) identifying the impact of mass media, particularly its portrayal of hip hop music and musicians, on low-income youth of color’s self-perception.

From 2016 to 2018, Janei served as the Program Coordinator for the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, where she produced community events, marketed the major coursework concentration, and advised student artists from historically silenced backgrounds. In this position, she helped to coordinate the 5th Element Global Hip Hop Pedagogy Symposium & Think Tank bringing together hip hop educators, community arts advocates, teaching artists, and those interested in the liberatory possibilities of hip hop pedagogies in 2017.

As a freelance creative director, Janei has choreographed and danced opening performances for artists including Ty Dolla $ign, Sevyn Streeter, Adrian Marcel, 2Chainz, Dreezy, and Husalah, as well as co-directed BLACKStage Presents The Wiz in 2018 at Stanford University. She has worked as a director and choreographer for several youth & adult dance teams across multiple genres, including Catch A Fyah Caribbean Dance team and Set It Off Step Squad. She was also a founding member of Next Generation Phenomenon dance crew, founded in Aurora in 2011, which evolved into One Motive and merged with COhe. She performed & competed with and choreographed for COhe One Motive at a local and national level from 2018 to 2020.