PRAISE BE OUR 2022/2023 COHORT
Arielle Julia Brown (she/her)
is a multidisciplinary cultural worker who commands and directs cultural spaces as sites for radical imagination, vision building and social transformation in her communities. Raised between Hayward California and Conley Georgia by her beloved migratory people, Arielle now also calls Philadelphia, PA home. Arielle’s practices traverse cultural strategy, performance curation, dramaturgy, facilitation and performance making. As a facilitator she has been most transformed by her work on The Love Balm Project, a workshop series and performance that centers the testimonies of mothers who have lost children to systemic violence (2010 -2015). Arielle is the founder and director of Black Spatial Relics, a performance residency, regrantor and convener supporting Black radical performance. Arielle is also a co-producer of Remember2019, an effort to center the congregation of Black Phillips County residents in the wake of the Elaine Massacre. Arielle is a 2021 Leeway Transformation Awardee. Recent dramaturgy credits include What We Ask of Flesh by Christal Brown/INSPIRIT (Jacobs Pillow Residency, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts 2022) Grounds That Shout curated by Reggie Wilson (Philadelphia Contemporary 2019), Salt Pepper Ketchup by Josh Wilder (Interact Theatre/ Passages Theatre 2018).
Ayana Omilade Flewellen (they/she)
is a Black Feminist, an archaeologist, an artist scholar and a storyteller. Flewellen is the co-founder and current President of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. They were selected for the inaugural 2021-2023 cohort Called By Water, directed by Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Oshun Jones, funded by Solidaire Networks’ Black Liberation Pooled Fund. In 2022 Ayana joined Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology as an Assistant Professor. Her research and teaching interests are shaped by and speak to Black Feminist Theory, historical archaeology, maritime heritage conservation, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, memory, and representations of slavery. Their artwork, like their archaeological scholarship, vacillates between the solidity of land and the liquidity of water. Rooting in the physicality of the ground, their adornments and small installation pieces are crafted from metal and stone. More recently, as their archaeological work has shifted from land to sea, her art practice has shifted to performance art centering on documenting submerged embodied practices of remembering.
Nicole L. Martin (she/her)
is a reimagined academic who left University life in late-2021 after spending six years building campus-wide anti-bias educational initiatives and helping to advance inclusive pedagogies, and nearly 15 years teaching courses in African-American studies, gender and women's studies, and performance studies. While her professional base has shifted, Nicole's creative and intellectual interests maintain their theoretical and methodological roots in Black feminisms, critical ethnography, and critical pedagogies. She is on a quest to discover home and homeplace through her familial and ancestral lands in Kansas and Oklahoma: how it is made, maintained, recovered, and passed on. Central to this work is the body as an epistemological site for remembrance and the (re)negotiation of social discourse. Nicole currently lives in San Antonio, TX with her tiny senior dog and works for a west-coast based tech company.
Dr. Amanda “Semente” Caroline de Oliveira Pereira, PhD (they/she)
is a multi-medium, visual, performance, and movement artist-activist-scholar originally from São Paulo, Brazil. Semente received their B.A from Brandeis University with double majors in International and Global studies and African and Afro-American Studies, and double minors in Latin American and Latino Studies, and Women and Gender Studies in 2015. Semente completed both an M.A. (2017) and Ph.D (2022) in African and African Diaspora Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. During the 2021-2022 academic year, Semente was the Williford University Engagement Fellow at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Semente is also a 200-hour trauma-informed healing-centered community yoga teacher certified through Sanctuary Yoga and The Amala Foundation, has been in various performances, trains the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira, and sustains an active visual art practice primarily in painting and sculpture.