Doctor K
Dr. Kahlil Almustafa Gasper is a community-engaged Spoken Word Poet, arts education leader, and cross-sector partnership builder whose work sits at the intersection of artistic practice, youth development, and cultural strategy. For more than two decades, he has used poetry as a tool for expression, community-building, education, and civic dialogue through performances, school-based residencies, and community cultural production. His work is focused on community engagement and collective imagination, creating spaces where young people and communities can tell the truth about their lives and transform those truths into art and action.
As an artist, Dr. Gasper’s practice is rooted in community, performance, facilitation, and cultural production. He is the author of Growing Up Hip-Hop: collected poems 1992–2007 (2008), a self-published collection that has been used in classrooms across the United States and has supported in-school workshops, community events, and a one-person multimedia performance. Earlier, he released CounterIntelligence (2006), a spoken word album that documents the political and cultural realities of post-9/11 New York City through the lens of a hip-hop generation artist, and later re-released the project digitally on its twentieth anniversary. Across his writing and recordings, he explores race, gender, class, love, and liberation with a signature blend of clarity, urgency, and tenderness.
Dr. Gasper’s artistic work has consistently been designed for community impact. In 2010, he created 100 Poems in 100 Days, a large-scale artistic practice that utilized poetry as democratic engagement. The project combined daily writing, living room readings, public dialogue, and participatory “remix” workshops that invited community members to create poems from public texts and current events. That same year, he produced The People’s Inauguration, an interactive event that centered poetry as a method for civic dialogue and public reflection.
His commitment to youth voice and public performance has also taken the form of festival and event production. In Queens, New York, he founded and produced Growing Up Queens, a youth poetry festival that brought students from multiple schools to major performance venues and created high-visibility opportunities for young people to share original work. His facilitation practice—grounded in inquiry, intergenerational dialogue, and culturally responsive pedagogy—has supported youth in developing both craft and confidence, while also strengthening the relational fabric of classrooms and communities.
In Los Angeles, Dr. Gasper has deepened his practice through partnerships with cultural institutions and schools. In 2016, he designed and led Walkout, an eight-week in-school residency with the Skirball Cultural Center that blended spoken word, theater, photography, and dialogue-to-performance. The residency supported tenth-grade students in transforming lived experience and civic questions into an original staged work, demonstrating Dr. Gasper’s ability to build creative process inside the school day while honoring student agency and collective authorship.
Dr. Gasper’s artistic leadership has also extended to organizational and cultural production at scale. As Interim Executive Director of Street Poets, he led public-private partnership work that expanded programming across juvenile detention centers, schools, and public spaces, and increased public visibility through new collaborations and performances. He served in an executive producer–like role on Street Poets’ tenth album, Wild Village (2018), elevating creative artifacts developed through ongoing programs and helping bring youth voices into public cultural memory.
Alongside his artistic practice, Dr. Gasper has built a career leading equity-centered initiatives across public systems, community organizations, and philanthropic intermediaries. His work is defined by an ability to translate community needs into strategy, build trust across stakeholders, and create operational systems that make ambitious programs deliverable.
Most recently, he served as a Senior Program Manager at Community Partners, where he managed large, equity-focused grant portfolios and built the operational infrastructure needed to move resources responsibly and effectively. In this role, he supported cross-sector initiatives by strengthening systems, improving workflows, and ensuring that community-serving programs had the structure and stewardship required to scale.
Previously, Dr. Gasper served as Program Manager at the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, where he contributed to regional arts education policy and implementation through innovation-focused initiatives and youth-centered engagement. His work included supporting collaborative processes that bring together schools, community partners, and public agencies—helping align arts learning goals with broader outcomes for young people.
Across roles, Dr. Gasper is known for leadership that is both strategic and relational: he listens deeply, names what is true, and builds clear plans that communities can own. He brings a practitioner’s understanding of what it takes to implement arts learning in real-world environments—especially in schools and public institutions—while maintaining a steadfast commitment to equity, cultural responsiveness, and measurable impact.
In 2025, Dr. Gasper and his wife, Julia Ahumada Grob, launched The Boujee Boo Crew, an online newsletter documenting their family’s recovery journey and reflecting on community, resilience, and belonging. The project extends his public storytelling practice into a written form that connects personal narrative to collective experience.
In 2026, they co-founded Home Microphone, a survivor-guided pop-up open mic series for Eaton Fire survivors in Altadena, California. Designed as a low-barrier, intergenerational space for storytelling, poetry, and music, Home Microphone brings neighbors together for joy, reflection, and healing—preserving cultural memory and strengthening social fabric through shared creative practice.
Whether he is producing a community open mic, designing a school-based residency, leading a public-private partnership, or building grantmaking systems, Dr. Gasper’s throughline is consistent: art is “not a luxury.” It is core to human infrastructure. His work demonstrates how creative practice can expand what communities believe is possible—by making room for truth, building relationships across differences, and turning story into strategy.
