Who is Rithm? A Brief View...
Hon. George "Rithm" Martinez is an artist/ activist / educator and is a political pioneer of the Hip-Hop community. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in a single parent home on public assistance and rose to become one of the first Hip-Hop Politicians, and the first active (MC) Hip-Hop artist/ activist to be elected to political office. He is a founding board member of the Hip-Hop Association (H2A) as well as a co-founder of the Blackout Arts Collective. Most recently he is serving as a US Cultural Envoy working with the US Department of State, Embassies and NGO's throughout Latin America.
George is a multi-talented Hip-Hop artist with 25 years of performance arts experience and over 14 years experience teaching and developing Hip-Hop based curricula. Starting out as a junior b-boy he quickly expanded his artistic reach to MC’ing and became a widely known NYC underground artist in the mid 90’s. In March 1996, his group Ground Zero which featured him and Jean Grae, formerly known as What? What? appeared as the Unsigned Hype in the Source Magazine. In November 2001, the Source covered his historic emergence into politics in the article "From Beats to the Ballot". Today George has production credits in both radio and television, is an award winning screen play writer, and continues to create and perform original Hip-Hop compositions as a member of Ground Zero along with his wife and partner Clara Guerrero Martinez, aka, Sylara.
George became a Doctoral Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center in 1998 and later became an adjunct lecturer of Political Science at Hunter College. He is currently an adjunct faculty member of political science at Pace University in NYC and guest lectures around the world. In 2008, he designed and helped implement the Political Literacy Curriculum of the Urban League of Anchorage Alaska's civic engagement initiative called Our Time: The Art of Political Activism.
George has almost 20 years experience as a social activist and in 2001 he ran for New York City Council to represent the communities of Sunset Park, Park Slope and Red Hook, Brooklyn. In 2002, he was elected to be the Democratic District Leader and State Committee member for the 51st Assembly District. Later he served as the Assistant Director of Intergovernmental Relations for the Attorney General of New York State, under former Governor Eliot Spitzer.
George has spoken and performed at universities, public schools, concerts, conferences, and prisons on subjects ranging from Latino politics, Hip-Hop in the classroom, to civic participation and new technologies. He conducts workshops based on the Original Elements of Hip-Hop, Social Entrepreneurship as an Alternatives to Gang Violence,and grassroots organizing to name a few. He has been cited or featured in newspapers worldwide including USA Today, Washington Post, LA Times, Nica Times, El Heraldo and the Detroit Free Press and authored the chapter “Hip-Hop Politics” in the Journal of Socialism and Democracy. In 2008, over 10,000,000 people throughout Latin America directly heard George's message of Improving the Future through Hip-Hop.
George is the founder and CEO of the Global Block Foundation, a non-governmental organization that functions in the United States as a 501 c3 non profit organization and whose US fiscal sponsor is the Hip-Hop Association.
He is available for keynotes, workshops, lectures, performances (Ground Zero), consulting, business opportunities and connecting through the Global Block Foundation....
