Chabot College instructor Dee Dee Stephens and her colleague Courtney Lloyd have established a virtual protest called the #ArtForGeorgeFloyd project for performing artists to engage in the fight for racial equality.

The idea is to use art to affect change, and so far more than 60 artists have expressed their feelings about George Floyd, other victims of police brutality, and systemic racism through a series of videos, each lasting exactly 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

Stephens met Lloyd while they were both obtaining masters in acting degrees at the University of Southern California. The two wanted to use their talents in performance art as well as their connections in the arts community to get everyone together for this cause.

"To start, we reached out to people that we knew," Stephens said. "The master's program we attended, in and of itself, was very diverse, and the two of us had been doing a lot of theater and standup comedy in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, so we reached out to our friends and connections to get involved, and organically these happened to be people who had immigrated from all around the world."

The collection of videos is being shared to raise awareness and money for Color of Change, a nonprofit organization that designs campaigns to help people make a difference and do something about injustice, and other similar organizations.

"We want to encourage everyone to participate in social change," Stephens said. "You just need to use what you have. We used our voices as artists to create a virtual protest, but you can use whatever skills you have to raise awareness and that, ultimately, creates change."

For more information, visit www.artforgeorgefloyd.com.