Our Origins:
During founder Miles Iton’s undergraduate years at New College of Florida’s customizable honors program, he committed his academic career to his study of hip-hop. This decision birthed the moniker “Irie Givens” - a nod to the island heritage also responsible for the genre’s landing onto 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx.
As Irie, he founded Freestyle & Floetry Tutorial as a hip-hop composition course sponsored by Classics Professor Dr. Carl Shaw. Freestyle & Floetry was further refined on the way to his senior thesis to encompass public speaking training, history of hip-hop as a subculture and the literary intersections between an emcee’s composition techniques and collective music and verse traditions throughout Eastern and Western societies.
After graduating from New College of Florida, Irie moved to Taiwan. There, he pursued a Masters degree in Creative Industries Design from Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University as a Fulbright scholar. Most of the fellow expat artists he met found themselves teaching English by day while trying to spark their artistic careers by night. He then realized the extent of hip-hop’s reach throughout world cultures, and how its art forms can be used as classroom tools for teachers and students alike.
In 2019 Lo-Fi Language Learning won Distinguished Honors (1st Prize) at National Taiwan University of Science & Technology’s Be Young Beyond Startup Competition in Taipei, Taiwan. Irie took advantage of this opportunity to blaze a path for more artists like himself to use rap as an entry point to more than just the music industry. Thus, Lo-Fi was established to expand towards a sustainable model for training more arts-inclined educators in the Irie-Miyagi technique: Lo-Fi’s customized methodology for teaching English through hip-hop’s mediums.
Our Mission:
Lo-Fi creates opportunities for aspiring urban artists to sustain and develop international careers as future cultural and creative industry leaders — with or without traditional academia!
Our vision is to reinvigorate our national focus on cultural and creative career development by fostering the professional development of our young artists, creating space for their desired outcomes from their education systems and prioritizing the post-collegiate integration of community and self.
