The Next Installment of...
The Last Supper Party

The Last Supper Party Performance Series
The Last Supper Party is a spoken word and performance series inspired by Fe Bongolan’s landmark painting of the same name; a 200 sq. ft. canvas that defines our Sutter Street office and live arts venue.

The Last Supper Party presents the voices of diverse artists and writers who call out the myriad injustices and impacts of corruption, unchecked power and greed.

We invite our audience to share ideas and bread and find inspiration in the thoughts and words of artists whose perspectives are drawn from a kaleidoscope of cultures. But who are united by compassion and a common desire to seek justice, equity and truth.

The Story of The Last Supper Party Painting
“1985. Ronald Reagan was still President. The global movement to end apartheid and free Nelson Mandela from Robben Island Prison was underway. In San Francisco homelessness was ramping up. The AIDS pandemic was taking down swaths of our city’s population: friends, family, and co-workers. Yet a whole other world of class and wealth did nothing while the rest of our world was in trouble. Sitting in my studio in an Inverness cabin, I stayed with my paints and let something happen. It was there that I found my artist’s voice to not attack directly, but to let the exposure of that apathy – bred by a society that embraced greed over humanity—do the work.

Thirty six years later, with all that has changed and not changed, it is painfully unsurprising that this painting still shouts.”

~ Fe Bongolan

About the Artists

Emily Zisman
Lyrical philosopher and storyteller of the contemporary human experience, Emily uses unabashed honesty and humor to punctuate the complexity of the entire escapade. Through songwriting, Emily seeks to foster healing and sincere connection by writing instinctually.  She writes songs that excavate shame and shine a light on the goodness and humor buried under each painful moment.

Rooja Mohassessy
Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Feb 2023) was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. Rooja has been featured on NPR, and her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, Verse Daily, The Adroit Journal, New Letters, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, The Pinch, The Rumpus, The Journal, and elsewhere.

Mary Magagna
Mary Magagna comes from Rock Springs, Wyoming, and lives in Berkeley, California. She moved to San Francisco in 1968 and became a poet, an activist, and a nurse but not necessarily in that order. She was recently published in the fabulous Colossus: Body. Other publications include Willows Wept Review, The Catholic Agitator, Fiction 365, The Scribbler, Crone’s Words, and Milvia Street Journal. Five poems in Awakenings Review is upcoming. A collection of her early work, Seeing What’s Not There can be found on-line at sharpsgiving.com

Richard Loranger
Richard Loranger is a multi-genre writer, performer, musician, visual artist, and all-around squeaky wheel who has been working around the United States for over forty years. They have lived in many parts of the country, including New York, Austin, Boulder, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and San Francisco, and currently live and work in Oakland, CA. They are the author of Mammal, Unit of Agency, Be A Bough Tit, Sudden Windows, Poems for Teeth, The Orange Book, and ten chapbooks, and have writing in over 100 magazines and journals. You can find more about their work and scandals at www.richardloranger.com.

Norma Smith
Norma Smith is a community scholar and social researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was born in Detroit and grew up in Fresno, California. She has worked as a journalist, editor, and writing coach, and as a conference and event organizer. Smith's writing has been published in scholarly, literary, and political journals. Nomadic Press published her first book of poems, Home Remedy (2017).

Shizue Seigel
Shizue Seigel is a San Francisco writer and visual artist who grew up in segregated Baltimore, Occupied Japan, California skid rows and sharecropping camps. She received a Jefferson Award for supporting Bay Area BIPOC writers through her nonprofit, Write Now! SF Bay. She’s a San Francisco Arts Commission Artist Grant recipient and VONA/Voices fellow. Her eight books include five anthologies of Bay Area BIPOC writers and artists, most recently Uncommon Ground: BIPOC Journeys to Creative Activism. Her prose and poetry have been published in Away Journal, sPARKLE + bLINK, Eleven Eleven, Persimmon Tree, and elsewhere.

Kimi Sugioka (Curator)
Kimi Sugioka is a poet, songwriter, and educator. She is the current Poet Laureate for the City of Alameda, a post that includes creating platforms for the presentation of a diverse variety of poets and spoken-word artists. Kimi also performs her own work frequently throughout the Bay Area. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and raised in Berkeley, California, Kimi has worked in public education for decades, and earned her BA from San Francisco State University and MFA from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Fe Bongolan (Creator of The Last Supper Party Painting)
Fe Bongolan is a Bay Area visual and performing artist. She is an alumnae of San Francisco State University with a Bachelor’s degree in Crafts and Design. She found theater arts in her last year at SFSU, and to this day it consumes her life. After working as an actress with Asian American Theater Company and Teatro Campesino, in 1992 she began work with the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, immediately involved as an artist from the community working alongside Rhodessa Jones in helping women inmates from San Francisco County Jail write their stories for performance. In 28 years with the Medea Project, Fe developed as actor, writer, dramaturge and assistant director to Rhodessa, helping inmates and ex-offenders find their voice and develop their writing for performance in jail, the community and main stage.