Ashanti, Ciara & H.E.R. To Honor Moms at VH1's 'Dear Mama: A Love Letter to Mom'

VH1 today announced its annual "Dear Mama: A Love Letter to Mom" will premiere on Monday, May 6th at 10PM ET/PT. Grammy Award®-winning artists Ashanti and MTV Push Artist H.E.R. will perform and pay tribute to their mothers who have shaped their success. Ciara, on behalf of #SeeHer, will honor deserving moms for the strides they've made in support of the group's mission of increasing accurate representation of women and girls in advertising and media.

Additional talent will be announced in the coming weeks. Previous A-listers who have appeared on "Dear Mama" specials include Alicia Keys, Will Smith, Halle Berry, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Colin Kaepernick, Sean "Diddy" Combs, Gabrielle Union, Teyana Taylor, Ludacris, DJ Khaled, Kelly Rowland, Robin Thicke, Chris Paul, Maxwell and more.

"Dear Mama: A Love Letter to Mom" will take place at The Theatre at Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, California.

For more updates go to DearMama.VH1.com.
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Official sponsors of "Dear Mama: A Love Letter to Mom" include Dove® Chocolate, Honey Nut Cheerios, Maybelline New York, Unilever, and Universal Orlando Resort.

"Dear Mama: A Love Letter to Mom" is produced by Flavor Unit and Jesse Collins Entertainment. Shakim Compere, Queen Latifah, Jesse Collins, and Jeannae Rouzan-Clay are Executive Producers. For VH1, Amy Doyle, Elena Diaz, Vanessa WhiteWolf and Andria Parides are Executive Producers, and Fonda Anita is Executive in Charge of Production.

VH1 is the dominant pop culture brand for adults 18-34. The network is available in 86 million U.S. households and has an array of digital channels and services including the VH1 App, VH1.com and @VH1. VH1 is a unit of Viacom Inc. (NASDAQ: VIA, VIAB). For more information, please visit www.VH1press.com, VH1.com, or the VH1 Facebook page. Follow us on Twitter @VH1PR.

Jesse Collins Entertainment (JCE) is a full service television and film production company founded by entertainment industry veteran Jesse Collins. For more than a decade, the company has played an integral role in producing some of television's most memorable moments in music entertainment including groundbreaking and award winning television programming including the BET Awards, Soul Train Awards, BET Honors, UNCF An Evening of Stars, ABFF Awards and the BET Hip Hop Awards. On the scripted side, JCE has produced numerous shows for BET including Real Husbands of Hollywood starring Kevin Hart as well as the critically acclaimed The New Edition Story, a biopic on the boy band that aired as a 3-part mini-series on BET in January 2017. It posted record ratings for the network and attracted nearly 30 million viewers. It was followed by The Bobby Brown Story, which chronicled the talented but troubled singer's exit from the popular '80s boy band through his solo success and was the highest rated non-tentpole program on the network since The New Edition Story. The second season of American Soul, the critically-acclaimed period drama based on the untold rise of the iconic music and dance program Soul Train, will debut in 2020. For VH1, JCE has produced the network's annual Mother's Day special, Dear Mama and the hit game show Hip Hop Squares. Next for JCE is Rhythm and Flow where judges Cardi B, Chance the Rapper and T.I. search for the next breakout hip-hop star in this music competition series for Netflix that will debut in late 2019. Collins is also a producer for The Grammy Awards and was on Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop 100 Power Players list. He has also been featured in numerous publications including Ebony magazine's Power 100 issue and on the cover of Vibe magazine. Go to http://www.jessecollinsent.com/ for more information on the company.

Despite the strides made to accurately portray women and girls in media, an unconscious bias persists against women and girls in advertising, media, and programming. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) launched the #SeeHer initiative in June 2016 in a partnership with The Female Quotient (TFQ) at the United State of Women. SeeHer's mission is to increase the accurate portrayals of women and girls in media 20 percent by 2020, the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote. The group developed a Gender Equality Measure (GEM™) to track progress and the marketing effect of removing unconscious bias from ads and programming. High GEM™ scores directly correlate to improved ROI. GEM™ won the 2017 ESOMAR Research Effectiveness Award. The methodology became the industry standard in the U.S., which led to a global rollout in 2018, making GEM™ the global "gold standard measurement. For more information, visit www.SeeHer.com.