Healing, Liberation, and the Journey of Three Black Men

Moderator
C. Davida Ingram is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and civic leader based in Seattle, Washington. Through her art and public programming, she has produced world-class creative experiences in contemporary arts, exhibit design, installations, and storytelling. Davida Ingram creates art that celebrates community portraiture while meditating on Liberation. Her work specifically focuses on the subjectivities of Black women and gender expansive people. In 2014, Ingram received the 2014 Stranger Genius Award in Visual Arts. In 2016, she became a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow and a finalist for the Neddy award in Visual Arts. In 2018, she was awarded the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency at the University of Washington. Seattle Magazine has voted Ingram both one of the 20 most talented people in Seattle (2016) and one of Seattle’s most influential people (2017). She was a Neddy Award finalist again in 2022. She’s a recent recipient of the Artist Trust Greg Kucera & Larry Yocom Fellowship Award 2024 and 4 Culture’s Artist grant. Ingram’s writings have appeared in Praxis Center for Social Justice, Arcade, Ms. Magazine blog, The James Franco Review, and The Stranger. Her art is part of the collections of the City of Seattle, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum, the Seattle Convention Center, and several private collections.

Panelists
Resmaa Menakem is a therapist and licensed clinical worker specializing in racialized trauma, communal healing, and cultural first aid. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Resmaa is now based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is a highly sought after public speaker and panelist both nationally and internationally. He is the author of several books, most notably the New York Times bestseller My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies, and The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning. As the originator and leading proponent of Somatic Abolitionism, an embodied antiracist practice for living and culture building, Resmaa is the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions and the Cultural Somatics Institute and is an educator and coach. Resmaa is a Senior Fellow with The Meadows Behavioral Healthcare and has worked as a county care counselor for civilian contractors in Afghanistan. Hailing from the city where George Floyd was killed and close friends with the special prosecutor who tried his killers, Resmaa is uniquely positioned at the heart of the matter. Working at the intersections of anti-racism, communal healing, and embodied purpose, Resmaa Menakem is the challenging yet compassionate coach we all need in this time of racial reckoning and near-global dysregulation.

Bayo Akomalafe’s original home is Nigeria yet life has led him to live in many places, currently Chennai, India and Western Massachusetts.  He is rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world. Bayo is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to Ije,  and a son and brother. Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker, post-humanist 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. He is Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species, emphasizing the power of indigenous wisdom and the need to “make sanctuary,” creating spaces for new possibilities to emerge. He is 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). He has been  appointed with many honors including the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural W. E. B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence for Trans-public Intellectualism at the Schumacher Centre for a New Economics.

Originally from Guyana, South America, Orland Bishop emigrated to Los Angeles by way of Brooklyn as a teenager.  A community organizer, philosopher, healer and teacher, Orland Bishop works within a global social network of individuals and agencies engaged with the Ecology of Nature and Human Consciousness within the realms of life and death. His work in healing and human development is framed by an extensive study of medicine, psychology, naturopathy, phenomenology, and indigenous cosmologies, primarily those of South and West Africa. He is the Co-Founder of Shade Tree Multicultural Foundation, a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to creating agreements of the heart for societal development where he focuses on mentoring youth and fostering social change through spiritual practices. Orland aims his work toward the development of consciousness and healing of cultures. His approach often involves bridging ancestral wisdom with visions of the future. He is the author of The Seventh Shrine: Meditations on the African Spiritual Journey.

Sienna McLean LoGreco has a passion for sharing stories that both entertain and inspire – stories of people striving to make a difference in the world. She has earned credits as a writer and producer for HBO, Showtime, A+E, VH1, and Discovery, as well as branded content for Ridley Scott’s RSA films. Her first short film, Still Revolutionaries, premiered at Sundance Film Festival, was lauded at festivals worldwide and continues to be distributed internationally. The 2024 HBO doc-series, Jerrod Carmichael: Reality Show was noted as one of the best TV shows of the year.  As the principal producer and interviewer for the Motion Picture Academy’s Visual History Project, she helped grow it from a single interview into a comprehensive look at the women and men who have shaped the last 50 years of moviemaking. Sienna was part of the team that launched the Television Race Initiative (now known as Active Voice), promoting documentary films addressing issues of race and equality, using them as a catalyst for community dialogue. More recently, her work has grown to include healing spaces and conversations around social inequity and racialized and generational trauma. She calls on her bi-racial/cross-cultural personal experience & identity to hold safe and inclusive spaces. Throughout her career, her work has cleaved towards finding and creating places to examine how to overcome difference and foster connection in our ever-divisive world. 

Victoria Santos’ work is rooted in a far-reaching vision of human potential. She has a deep commitment to our collective liberation. Her work emphasizes intersectional awareness, individual and collective healing, and compassionate action. She is the founder and director of the Center for Healing and Liberation, an organization dedicated to fostering healing, wellness, and racial and social justice. Also, as founder and co-executive director of Ile Kimoyo, Victoria is part of a cultural change movement that prioritizes health and wellness for BIPOC leaders and changemakers. Victoria is a Spanish-fluent Afro-Latina immigrant born in the Dominican Republic. She has trained in the fields of psychology, conflict resolution, trauma healing, meditation, rituals, and embodied practices. 

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and The Center for Healing and Liberation.