Electric Black Earth Festival
April 18–21, 2024
An afrofuturist and astrological festival
Experience the Electric Black Earth Festival at Naropa University, a transformative ethno-ancestral futures affair. Join visionaries, activists’, scholars’ and healers’ astro-cosmic quest for just and abundant earth-based futures. Engage in Black-centric world-building through ritual, rest-shops, and liberatory transmissions.
Thurs. April 18
Fri. April 19
Sat. April 20
Sun. April 21
Our Co-Sponsors
Registration is required for attendance.
Nalanda Campus – morning
9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Online Only – asynchronous recording will be delivered at 9am but available anytime after with preregistration RSVP
Jupiter/Uranus Chart Reading w/Embodied Astrology
Celebrations, conversations, collaborative art, poetry and ritual to commemorate Uranus and Jupiter’s conjunction in Taurus. How can we work with Afrofuturism and other speculative modalities, in conjunction with astrology, to articulate a people’s vision of the 21st century? The 2020s have already shown themselves to be the gateway into the new millennium. Climate disruption, currency inflation, racial reckoning, forced migration, the specter of AI and other post-normal, runaway trends compel us to face tomorrow afresh.
ONLINE ONLY – LEARN MORE & RSVP
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9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
General Assembly –Opening Ritual
Nalanda Events Center
IN PERSON ONLY – RSVP FOR MORE INFO
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Nalanda Campus – afternoon
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
The Language of MOTHER: A Channeled Conjuring of Curated Listening & Collective Liberation w/ Jaguar Womban
The intention of this Ritual Transmission is to attune our inner ears to the channel and frequency of our shared MOTHER for the purpose of conjuring a shared state of collective liberation and orgasmic birthing that will enable the New Earth Frequency to ground and descend into our body~mind~spirit and physical reality through the hallways of our heart and pineal portal of our mind’s eye.
ONLINE AND IN PERSON – LEARN MORE & RSVP
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2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Navigating a Black Future (in a white body): Embodying Transformation (for white and white-passing bodies) w/Nic Aquino-Roithmayr
This workshop is for white and white passing people to help orient to what our role is in living into a Black Future. To be in right relationship with the Afro Futurism Festival we start by transforming our embodied patterns of centering the white experience. We will explore what it means to center the liberation of Black Indigenous and Bodies of Culture on our own liberatory path.
ONLINE AND IN PERSON – LEARN MORE & RSVP
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3:45 PM – 5:15 PM
Alluvial Cartographies: Ley Lines of Blackness (Part I) w/Desiree Mwalimu-Banks
This workshop explores Constellations of Blackness through cartographies of sound. Hearing voices in the dream world? Swore you heard the same words at some point in the waking world…just the other day? How can sound become a vehicle for an intentional application of healing frequencies? How does sound carry the seeds of our Ancestor’s memories through and beyond this time-space continuum?
IN PERSON ONLY – LEARN MORE & RSVP
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6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Written Into Being w/Giselle Buchanan
In this generative writing workshop, we will explore the words that make us and the worlds we create with them. Taking inspiration from poets and word magicians like Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, Willie Perdomo, Morgan Parker and others, we will read and craft poems in vibrant community. Come prepared to write and share with the group.
Luminaries
Giselle Buchanan is a Caribbean American poet, cultural worker, and educator from The Bronx, NY. For over a decade, she has read poems and curated mixed-media creative writing workshops with educational institutions and arts organizations. During this time she has held space for hundreds of students seeking to explore and liberate their creative voices. Giselle has authored and self published many chapbooks and zines including her most recent Incantations (2019). She was included in the publication First Made into Language produced by Southern Exposure, which now lives in the permanent collection of the Met Library. Her work has been featured by media outlets such as Ms. Magazine, The Creative Independent, The Cut, Hanging Loose Magazine, Nickelodeon, and MSG Network among others.
Nicholas Aquino-Roithmayr
Nic moves in the world to create power and momentum towards collective healing in our current global moment and to advance the creation of our shared humanitarian future. Trained in somatic healing, meditation instruction, and contemplative psychotherapy, nic uses a mix of multidisciplinary practices to invite those he works with into a process of settling the body-mind to unhook from the momentum, pressure, and constrictions of harmful social norms and return to an authentic generative life pulse. nic sees clients as a psychotherapist focusing on intergeneration wounds within the individuals and families he works with. He is the co-founder of the Center for Radical Connection creating generative collaboration across differences in power and identity. nic's life pulse leads him to swim in the oceans, soak in hot springs, raft through rivers. He has a widespread community in the U.S. and travels frequently to spend time and share food with his loved ones.
Jaguar Womban (La Vonne Natasha Caesar) is a multidimensional healing artist, Medicine Womban and Visionary Mother of The WOMBNation. She is an intuitive herbalist, ancestral channel, poet and teacher who shares ways to connect to Mother Earth using Plant Medicine and Ceremony. In both her private TEAsessions and monthly virtual New Moon WombSteam, Jaguar teaches how to use the unique self-care practice of WombSteaming as a Ritual of Prayer and a Sacred Tool to awaken our innate Womb Wisdom and Divine Internal Guidance System.
Monticue Connally
Monticue Connally is a Colorado Community Herbalist and Medicine Man who resonates with the sounds of African Drums, Rhythmic Chanting and Afro-Caribbean Folklore. Herbs, Medical Astrology, the outdoors, singing and alternative healing methods have been a lifelong interest for the life-long Denver resident who continues to use workshops, music, humor and fun to teach people in urban areas how to access the earthly medicines growing around them. He’s led various classes and herb walks at spaces such as Ruby Hill Tiny Farm and the lovely Woodbine Ecology Center. He has taught for the Denver Botanic Gardens Herbal Certification Program and now teaches for the Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism. He received the Preventative Care Leadership Award from the Be Well Health Initiative in 2019 for being of service to diverse black and brown communities, pushing them towards the accessible and immediate plant medicines growing all around them. Instagram: @monticue_the_herbalist, Facebook: Monticue Connally, Patreon: Patreon.com/arootawakening
Desirae Callaway
Desirae is a PhD student, bodyworker, and mother. Impassioned by social justice, self-discovery, and systems thinking, Desirae merges their reclamation of ancestral knowledge with her passions to bring a thoughtful perspective to postcapitalist decolonial feminism.
Stephen Lewis
Stephen is the president of the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) and creator of DO GOOD X, a startup accelerator. He is co-author of Another Way: Living and Leading Change on Purpose and A Way Out of No Way: An Approach to Christian Innovation. Stephen’s journey and experiences have led him to following his ancestral call to retrieve and share the ancestral healing wisdom of his community to create a more hopeful future. As a student of the Late Elder Malidoma Somé, he encourages and supports a new generation who yearns “for ancient wisdom that can withstand the big questions, worthy dreams, and severe tests of resilience and perseverance that greet or confront them daily.” During the past 20 years, he has worked to inspire the next generation of artists, healers, freedom fighters, faith-inspired leaders, and entrepreneurs to live and work on purpose.
Desiree Mwalimu-Banksy
Desiree Mwalimu-Banks is a Zambian-born, East Coast-raised interdisciplinary-ess, exploring somatic relationships between indigeneity, water ecologies, and apiary culture, within the Sacred Feminine-African diaspora. She’s partnered with Naropa, Stanford, Harvard, and Wave Farm Radio in revisioning embodied collaborations with the natural world. Among her publications, “Nectar of the Divine Feminine: The Ancient Bee Mothers of the Anahata Chakra,” is included in the anthology, Harmony In Chakras. When not hunting leylines, labyrinths, or deep space objects, Desiree can be found making miracles on a budget in her kitchen. She lives in Harlem with her husband, sons, and Smith Corona Electric ‘76 typewriter.
April N. Baskin
April N. Baskin is an award-winning Black, Cherokee, and Jewish leader and Kohenet (an ordained feminist, earth-based Jewish priestess) with over 20 years of expertise in multi-dimensional (trauma-informed, intersectional, and interculturally-competent) social and racial justice leadership. She serves as the full-time director of Joyous Justice, a multiracial community-powered social justice and spiritual transformation organization providing liberatory, trauma-informed life & leadership coaching, consulting, and education. Recognized as a Faith Leader to Watch by the Center for American Progress, April's career includes significant inaugural roles such as serving as a DEI+ Vice President of a $90M national non-profit and as the Racial Justice Director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, which supports 70+ social justice organizations. April has initiated and/or advanced the DEI+ initiatives of more than 300 organizations and launched transformative equity-focused executive and mentorship programs that have significantly accelerated and advanced the careers and leadership trajectories of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC professionals. All her leadership is enhanced by her 10 years of ongoing training and experience as an international, counter-oppressive trauma peer counselor, in addition to her education at Tufts University and graduate-level research at the Kennedy School of Government. Currently based in Folsom, CA, April lived in Dakar, Senegal for 4 years with her beloved Senegalese Sufi Muslim partner, Assane. She loves dogs, dance, and is passionate about advancing joyous and unapologetic collective liberation and healing with kindred spirits like you.
Teresa Mateus, MSW, E-RYT 200
Teresa Mateus, MSW, E-RYT 200 brings together Indigenous and Western lineages of healing from her degree in Clinical Social Work from NYU and her mentorship and initiation into the Andean lineage spiritual-healers from the Q'eros tribal tradition of Paqos (healers). She was also trained in Sivananda Yoga in 2009 and has practiced integrative mental health and spiritual care for nearly 20 years, integrating mind-body-spirit care including somatic practices, creative arts, equine-facilitated psychotherapy, and mindfulness for healing trauma. Her work integrates the intersections of spirituality, liberation and healing grounded in ancestral reclamation, particularly for BIPOC/QTBIPOC communities. She is an author, speaker and teacher on a variety of topics at the intersections of spirituality, activism and healing as well as the creator of national training programs for healers and spiritual care providers. Teresa was born in Bogota, Colombia and loves to return to the Andes whenever she can, back to her tierra sagrada (sacred land) of her birthplace. Learn more about Teresa at www.teresamateus.com.
Ristina Gooden (she/her)
Ristina Gooden (she/her) is the Associate Director of Spiritual Innovation at FMN and current PhD student at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Brittney Jackson (she/her) is the Chief Operating Officer for Faith Matters Network.
Renee Sills (they/she) is a second generation astrologer, intuitive, somatic educator and founder of Embodied Astrology – a podcast and community platform centering queer, intersectional approaches to astrology in application with other forms of knowledge, healing and creating. The throughlines of their work are investigations of interrelatedness, spirituality, mindfulness, creative agency, and adaptive processes of human bodies and consciousness in times of apocalypse. Renee’s work weaves together and between realms of mysticism, bodywork, healing ritual and participatory art. She seeks to proliferate accessible, adaptable, embodied practices that reawaken enchantment, empathy and environmental interrelatedness.
Junauda Petrus
Junauda Petrus is a writer, a soul sweetener, runaway witch, and performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born and working on unceded Dakota land in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work centers around pleasure, wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness and liberation.
Her first YA novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt a Black, experimental healing art collective. She is a Jerome 2021-2022 Artist Fellow in Literature. She is currently working on several projects including her second novel Black Circus, writing a puppet show and adapting her first book into a feature film.
Carla RM Burns
Carla RM Burns, MDiv, is an Instructor in Naropa’s Core College, including BA Contemplative psychology courses, and meditation practicums, and for Naropa’s Compassion Initiative. She serves as faculty for the MA Contemplative Psychotherapy residential retreat program, and is the Program Manager for the Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education. Her specialties include the integration of corporeal, elemental, and spatial knowledge as a means to bring more dimension into our field of awareness, as a means to cultivate the natural- receptive wisdom energy of the body that is inherently connected, wise, and spacious.
Venerable Pannavati
Venerable Pannavati, Maha Theri is a former Christian pastor, uniquely ordained in both Theravada and Mahayana traditions. She is also a Vajrayana teacher. Particularly inspired by her final lineage master, she offers authorized esoteric lineage teachings, empowerments and activities using skillful means. She is co-founder of Heartwood Refuge, an intentional monastic and lay residential community; Correct Cultivation Learning from Buddha Academy, and Embracing Simplicity Hermitage monastic order. Venerable also serves on Buddhist and inter-spiritual leadership boards, internationally, having retired from decades of active work in humanitarian projects advocating and serving women’s advancement, education for Dalits (India’s Untouchables) and full ordination for female monks.
Michelle and Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish
Michelle and Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish are a dynamic duo plotting and scheming ecotopian ancestral futures officially since the year 2000. By means of education, imagination, embodiment, community organizing, permaculture design, advocacy and cultural therapy they work to heal personal and structural wounds, catalyze individual and social genius and activate of our heritages as children culture and cosmos.
