Celebrating the beauty and the brilliance of the African Diaspora
WE’VE BEEN CELEBRATED BY…
Because for Black folks the world has ended many times over and yet, here we are our Ancestors’ joy.
Our existence is a testament to their resilience and it continues to live in our blood and bones.
We’re honored to have brilliant medicine keepers, creative visionaries and luminous healers join us for a day where we can gather around and celebrate and anchor to the truth of who we are.
In this rich and thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe we explore many themes. Here’s what you’re in store for…
ABOUT BAYO
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to
Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker,
posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds
Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will
Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network
and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at
Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and
Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia). In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural
Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He has also
been appointed Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for
the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023). He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from
the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities
convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence
in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022.
www.bayoakomolafe.net
www.emergencenetwork.org
You have Big Dreams for living a Big Life, but you have one Big Problem—you don’t trust yourself. Learn how to let go of that self-doubt and change your life in this workshop led by author and award-winning journalist L’Oreal Thompson Payton. This session will force you to stop playing small and encourage you to fully step into your power and walk in your purpose. It will awaken the dreams you buried deep within your soul long ago because you thought they were impossible, unattainable—available to other people, but not you. Until now.
ABOUT L’OREAL
L’Oreal Thompson Payton is an award-winning journalist and the author of the forthcoming book, Stop Waiting for Perfect: Step Out of Your Comfort Zone and Into Your Power. Her personal essays, feature stories and celebrity interviews have been published in esteemed media outlets such as Bustle, Essence, Fortune, SELF, Shondaland, and Well + Good among others.
L’Oreal’s writing, speaking engagements, and wellness facilitation work pull from her personal struggles with issues such as self-doubt, imposter syndrome, infertility, and postpartum depression to encourage and inspire other Black women to see, trust, and believe in the beauty of who they are as enough even as they strive to become more than that.
When she’s not busy writing–which, to be fair, isn’t often–she can usually be found reading, on her yoga mat or riding her Peloton. L’Oreal lives just outside of Chicago with her very patient husband and brilliant daughter whose laugh lights up her world. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @LTIntheCity. Subscribe to her motivational newsletter and listen to her podcast at LTintheCity.com.
In this powerful workshop led by Fiona Compton founder of Know Your Caribbean you’ll explore…
ABOUT FIONA
Fiona Compton is a London based Saint Lucian photographer artist, public speaker, filmmaker and historian.
Fiona has been working as a professional photographer with the UK’s largest publishing houses, travelling across
Europe to photograph some of the most influential figures in the world of Finance and Banking.
Fiona continues her mission to educate in innovative ways through events and online through her account ‘Know Your Caribbean’ via Instagram which facilitates educational posts on short palatable bursts.
Know Your Caribbean has a reach of up to 3,000,000 impressions per month via Instagram alone, with a growing Twitter and Facebook presence.
Fiona has produced creative workshops for children and young people teaching the history and culture of the Caribbean and its linkages to Africa, in venues such as the South Bank Centre and Black Cultural Archives in London.
Clients have included Amazon Meta, Samsung, and Sony Music. Much of her work surrounds self empowerment, identity and challenging representation, which has led her work to be part of several public speaking
engagements, both locally and internationally.
Riva Nyri Precil will be presenting a healing experience demonstrating and teaching Haitian folklorique movements accompanied Haitian music, drumming and chanting. These spiritually influenced movements will assist in tapping into our divine frequencies to heal, connect, and ground ourselves.
ABOUT RIVA
Born in Brooklyn, Riva Nyri Precil grew up in Haiti where she was exposed to and studied under many of the great masters of Haiti’s cultural and artistic scene. She began dancing Haitian folklore with the living legend, Viviane Gauthier, and then went on to study at Artcho Danse, where she studied Ballet, Jazz, Modern, & Folklore. She appeared in La Passion de Toussaint as a dancer/actress/singer, a production performed at the National Palace to commemorate the Haitian revolution and celebrate its bicentennial. Riva moved to the United States the age of 16 where she attended LaGuardia Performing Arts and continued to study Haitian dance at Alvin Ailey with dance instructor Peniel Guerrier. She later went on to perform in several Kriye Bode productions where she played the role of the Tainos queen Anacaona. While attending Loyola University of New Orleans, Riva choreographed an entire tribute performance to raise funds and awareness for performing arts schools in Haiti after the earthquake. Riva now teaches her own Haitian folkloric dance class “Tout Se Pa” where she highlights the rich and diverse rhythms and dances of Haitian culture.
Medicine for our healing can be found in the holding: the stories we hold about our experiences, the stories we want to hold, who holds us through it, and how we hold ourselves. Join Natalee Facey as she guides us through a deep, soul-full journey of honoring and alchemizing what we hold and how we’re held.
ABOUT NATALEE
Natalee is a Resilience Coach, Embodiment Healing Guide, and ReBirth Doula. She walks with women and femmes who are navigating loss related to pregnancy, relationships, and their bodies.
Natalee believes that loss can be an initiation into becoming a more powerful and authentic version of ourselves. She is with her clients through that initiation—supporting them in releasing grief, shame, guilt and other heavy emotions; reconnecting to their sense of wholeness; and moving into their personal rebirth.
Natalee is also the host of The Preparing for Pregnancy After Loss Podcast, which provides education and tools for thriving in life and pregnancy after loss or an infertility diagnosis. She’s been recognized by the Borough of Brooklyn for her work providing support to families who’ve experienced pregnancy and infant loss.
Natalee is originally from the island of Jamaica, where she credits her deep connection to nature, and her love for music, movement, and laughter as medicine. Learn more about her work nataleefacey.com.
Thérèse will weave a tapestry of embodied healing through song, somatics, poetry and breath to commune with the depth and breadth of your body and our collective bodies.
ABOUT THÉRÈSE
Thérèse Cator is the founder of Embodied Black Girl, a global community that centers the healing and liberation of Black women and femmes. She’s also a mother, a Decolonial Leadership mentor, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, an anti-oppression facilitator, an artist and a healer from a deep lineage of medicine people and revolutionaries. Over the past 14 years, Thérèse has worked with people from all backgrounds and her work has been featured in Forbes and Mashable twice as well as Essence, Travel Noire, Jezebel, Authority Magazine, Mind Body Green, Motherly, Yahoo News, among others. Thérèse’s work weaves together spirituality, somatics and social change and exists in the world to provide deep counsel and guidance to cultural shapers to heal intergenerationally, unearth their deepest expression of embodied leadership and birth revolutionary work and worlds. She hold a BA from NYU and MFA from Rutgers.
Join us for a full day of magic and medicine!
Embodied Black Girl stands for the embodied liberation and healing of Black women globally. We’re devoted to creating spaces for our sisters and siblings of color across the diaspora where they’re seen, empowered and deeply held.
While many of our bodies and those of our ancestors have been sites for harm and violence, we also hold the knowledge that our bodies have the power to transform intergenerational trauma into intergenerational medicine. Our deepest intention is to provide mental, emotional and spiritual wellness that supports our individual collective healing and thriving while championing social change.
We believe healing is personal and political; spiritual and corporeal. Our offerings weave together a mosaic of modalities all somatically rooted, trauma informed and grounded in a decolonial lens. We’re here for radical healing to weave the new world from the inside out because the revolution is embodied.