Danielle Fox – Women Make Waves: Radio During the Black Arts Movement and Beyond
Danielle Fox, Class of 2017, is studying English and Psychology at Barnard College. She is very grateful to have had the opportunity to speak with two women who inspired their communities over the radio during the Black Arts Movement and beyond. Engaging with Shange’s texts and archive throughout this year have helped Danielle uncover the magic that exists in everyday rituals.
Nicole Hines – Black Dance is Black Life: Dianne McIntyre and Black Performance Art
Nicole is a Junior at Barnard College and an Africana Studies Major. Her experiences in reading Ntozake Shange’s works have changed how she views the power of performing arts as an art form that has the capacity to do cultural work as well as connect with people. Shange’s poetry has inspired Nicole to rethink what it means to tell a story and reevaluate the ways we communicate these stories to others.
Dania Lewis – In the Times of Mothering Myself: Black Girlhood, Archiving Pain and Healing Through Self-Portraiture
Dania Lewis is an Africana and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Major with a Concentration in Race and Ethnicity who is becoming more comfortable with her artistry. She is brave, afraid, unafraid and truly blessed to have gone on a journey of healing with and through Ntozake Shange.
Mei Suet Loo – Archival Futurity: Our Visions Through Third World Women’s Archives
Mei Suet Loo, who also goes by Michelle colloquially, is an Urban Studies major, concentrating in American history. She is committed to learning from, and building and working with her peers, aunties, and younger cousins in her life projects. Shange’s work in navigating, describing, and imagining diasporic histories and futures has inspired her to process these realities through art.
Melissa Louidor – The Hallowed Breath of Life
Melissa Louidor, a self-described sun goddess, is a double WGSS and Africana Studies Major. Her love of literature drew her to this course and a passion for storytelling through dance and writing has driven her creative investments. Melissa enjoys writing haikus and long journal entries about food. While she has always looked forward to a career as a writer or professor, she has recently undergone a consciousness reawakening and hopes to someday become a flamenco dancer. Through Shange, she has discovered god in herself and in all the beauty that brings joy to life.
Nadia Mbonde – A Daughter’s Cosmography
Nadia Naomi Mbonde, class of 2017, is an Africana Studies major and Dance minor. Nadia’s interactions with Ntozake Shange through the archives, literature, and in-person radically impacted the way she understands her own identity as a dancer, scholar, artist, daughter and diasporan.
Kiani Ned – MANIFESTO AND METHODS OF THE ARCHIVAL BODY
Kiani Ned is majoring in Art History with a Visual Arts concentration at Barnard College. She first encountered Ntozake Shange through “for colored girls” and continues to engage with the work of Shange in her artistic practice, on daily walks, in the kitchen, and in her connections with other folks grappling with what it means to be alive and tender.
Oluwayemisi Olorunwunmi – Laying the Foundation for New Institutions: The Artist’s Approach to Black Justice
Yemisi Olorunwunmi, Columbia College Class of 2018, is a Nigerian immigrant from Boston, Massachusetts majoring in Political Science, African Studies, and Creative Writing. Much of her work has been analyzing the consequences and partnerships that exist as a result of Ntozake Shange’s art. Through her professional careers in photography, poetry, and peacebuilding, Yemisi has had the opportunity to build bridges between places and people with the aim of reconstituting the black being as a celebrated entity.
Amanda Perry – When Poetry Meets Paint: An Interrogation of the Collaborative Effort
Amanda Perry, class of 2017, is a painter from the Bronx, NY majoring in Africana Studies and minoring in Art History. Ntozake Shange’s work has increased Amanda’s investment in and curiosity about intergenerational communication as a means of passing down traditions of healing & survival.
Sophia Richards: Print Media and Black Feminisms in 1979
Sophia Richards is a sophomore English major at Barnard College who regularly works in theatre, fashion, and all forms of printed matter. She applied to this course with an intense love of Toni Morrison disenchanted by the absence of black women in her life, and is so grateful for the work of Shange and her classmates which has steadily unwound her heart. Shange’s notion of “carnal intellectuality” rewrote Sophia’s relationship with academia, and she hopes that the further dissemination of her poetry will allow women to form new and confident ties between their intellect and the nappy edges of themselves and the world.
Gabrielle Smith – When Poetry Meets Paint: An Interrogation of the Collaborative Effort
Gabrielle Smith is an African Studies major at Barnard College and will be graduating this year. She continues to write and perform poetry throughout the city. The love for storytelling brings her to Shange’s work in particular. Her experience in the archive, International Center of Photography and Schomburg are ones that she’s excited to share with you. She hopes to eventually publish her own work and she says Ntozake Shange plays a large role as to why.
Clarke Wheeler – This Would Change Over Time: Archived Revisions of Black Arts and Feminisms
Clarke is a senior from Washington, D.C., double majoring in Political Science and Africana Studies at Barnard College. Through engaging with Shange’s work, Clarke reflects on her own raced, classed, and gendered experiences both at home and abroad, and interrogates her identities, beliefs, and customs within diasporic and ancestral contexts. She looks forward to graduating, and finding new spaces where she can expand and thrive.