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Hon. George “Rithm” Martinez is an award winning artist/ activist / educator and founding board member and the current chairman of the award winning Hip-Hop Association (H2A). He is also the co-founder of Blackout Arts Collective. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in a single parent home on public assistance and rose to become the first Hip-Hop Politician, (MC) Hip-Hop artist/ activist to be elected to political office in the United States. Most recently he was named US Cultural Envoy by the US State Dept and has already worked with embassies in Bolivia, Honduras, and El Salvador.

George is a multi-talented Hip-Hop artist with 25 years of performance experience and over 12 years experience teaching and developing Hip-Hop based curricula. Starting out as a break dancer he quickly expanded his artistic reach to MC’ing and became a popular 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. 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 Sylara.

Recognizing the potential power of Hip-Hop in community organizing in 1997, he co-founded Blackout Arts Collective, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering communities of color through arts activism and education. Blackout received the Union Square Award for Grassroots Activism in 2002 and continues to be a leader in Hip-Hop activism and education.

As an educator George became a Doctoral Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center in 1998 and later became an adjunct professor of Political Science at Hunter College and is currently an adjunct faculty member at Pace University. George is the former Assistant Director of Intergovernmental Relations for the former Attorney General and current Governor of New York State Eliot Spitzer.

George has been invited to speak/ perform at universities, forums, and conferences on subjects ranging from Latino politics, Hip-Hop in the classroom, to civic participation and new technologies. He has been cited in over 150 newspapers worldwide including USA Today, Washington Post, LA Times, Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press and recently authored “Hip-Hop Politics” in the Journal of Socialism and Democracy. He is currently available for keynotes, workshops, lectures, and performances (Ground Zero).and thats not even half of the total...word!