Oceanic Maroon States & Other Nations Beyond Places
An Afro-Ethno Futures Astrologic Festival
February 26–March 1, 2026
Step out of our dystopian times and cross the border to immerse in liminal spaces seeking collective liberation, radical futures and attuned nowness. Join a cyclically manifesting, fugitive community of afro/ethno/ancestral futurists, scholars, makers, astrologers, healers, poets, creatives, activists, policy makers, protectors, students and educators as we open to infinite identities and social relationships that call forth our deeper human potentials, charting futures beyond exploitation
Day 1 - The Non-Event of Emancipation: Resting in the Wake of Un-Freedom
8:00 AM - 8:45 AM Sound Bathing and "Sacred Naps"
Location: Arapahoe Campus and Online
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Morning Embodied Astrological Teaching with Aaliyah Shivers of Embodied Astrology
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Lincoln Studio, and Online
10:15 - 11:00 AM Festival Opening and Daily Overview with Regina Smith & Ramon Parish
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Lincoln Studio, and Online
11:15 AM - 12:45 PM - Parallel Workshop - Reversing Temporality: Tracing Black Sesame and Treating Time Sickness with Asia Dorsey
Location: Online
Black Sesame Seeds, also known as Black Benne, were introduced into the New World by enslaved Africans and cultivated in backyard gardens throughout the American South to bring about prosperity. Prosperity is time. Contexts of extraction have left Black bodies short on time. Contracted lifespans and accelerated reproductive cycles have left us sprinting through the marathon of life. Slow down and take back your time with Herbalist and Nutritional Therapist Asia Dorsey in a rich exploration of the Genius of this Black Benne Seed and its ability to reverse the ravages of time as an act of reparation.
11:15 AM - 12:45 PM - Parallel Workshop - Liquid Futures: A Slow Archive of Black Study as Survival Practice with djones
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Lincoln Studio
This presentation introduces the work of liquid blackness, a research group and theoretical framework that approaches Black study as a collective, “ensemblic” practice. Building upon this foundation, I present my primary research agenda: A Slow Archive of Black Study. Developed through my doctoral work, this agenda is rooted in the concept of blackness as practice—a method of study that resists institutional constraints in favor of a relational, intergenerational gathering of fragments. Utilizing a “mixtape methodology” to organize this framework, I demonstrate how a creative, remixed approach to theory enables a deeper engagement with Black feminist metaphysics and spiritual metadata. By blending research with an expansive creative practice, I argue that the slow archive functions as a vital point of impact between the past and the future. Ultimately, this work is a survival practice—an intentional effort to imagine liberation as a nesting place and to leave behind a record of the fugitive labor required to sustain until we arrive there.
2:30 - 4:30 PM Preach That: Afro Pessimism & Afro Futurism in Conversation with Regina Smith & Ramon Parish
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Lincoln 4140, and Online
5:30 - 7:30 PM Astro-Divination and Sonic Improvisation
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Performing Arts Center
Day 2 - Rituals of Resistance and Other Ancestral Lessons
Location: Arapahoe Campus and Online
8:00-8:45 AM: Sound Bathing and "Sacred Naps"
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Lincoln Lecture Hall (basement of Lincoln) and Online
9:00 - 10:00 AM Morning Embodied Astrological Teaching with Sherri Taylor of Embodied Astrology
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Lincoln Studio and Online
10:00 - 10:15 AM Theme Setting and Overview with Regina Smith & Ramon Parish
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Lincoln Studio and Online
10:45 AM - 12:15 PM Parallel Workshops - (choose one):
Parallel Workshops - Future Town/Warm Cookies of the Revolution with Adrian Molina
Location: Online
Warm Cookies of the Revolution is the world’s first civic health club. The motto is Vote Every Day. Culture is power, and creativity is power. This is how we approach the question of civic futures. We center art, music, food, joy and radical imagination in everything we do. Future Town Tour is our rural strategy. Future Town reimagines small towns in rural America, placing them in the future, rather than in the past. It’s a simple concept – an invitation to the reality that anything is possible.
The session begins as a presentation of Warm Cookies and Future Town ethos. It then opens up into an experiential session. Bring a marker or sharpie, and a newspaper page/clipping from your city, burb, or town.
Parallel Workshops - Afro Fantasy Divination: When Sankofa, Planets and Tarot Become One with Monticue Connally
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Lincoln 4140
When Tarot is reimagined and the planets become Black again, a portal opens and deep truths emerge. You are a multidimensional human, vast and spacious with needs that span realities. What herbs, prayers or rituals do you need to bring balance to your own inner multiverse? In this workshop we will cover the 9 realms that come together to make a human and how we can use Oracle work, the planets and plants to bring balance to them all.
2:00 - 3:30 PM Pods, Integration & Social Time
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Lincoln 4140
3:45 - 4:45 PM Open Grief Sanctuary & Integration Activities
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Center for Culture Identity & Social Justice AND Online
5:00 - 7:00 PM Elder Evening: Ancestral Wisdom and the Future Present
Location: Arapahoe Campus, Performing Arts Center (PAC) AND Online
Day 3 - Afrotopian Performances & the Black Atlantic Exchange
Location: Nalanda Campus and Online
8:00 AM - 8:45 AM Sound Bathing and "Sacred Naps"
Location: Nalanda Campus, 9184 and Online
9:00 - 10:00 AM Morning Embodied Astrological Teaching with Kim Calder and Phoenix of Embodied Astrology
Location: Nalanda Campus, 9184 and Online
10:15 - 10:30 AM Theme Setting and Overview with Regina Smith & Ramon Parish
Location: Nalanda Campus, 9184 and Online
10:45 am - 12:00 PM Parallel Workshops - (choose one):
Parallel Workshops - Ancient Mermaids (of our) African Future with Jaguar Womban
Location: Online
Calling on all Creatures of the Intergalactic Ocean to Enter the Channeled Frequency of the Ancient African Quantum Mermaid {WATER} Transmission ~ This virtual happening will converge with the intention of accessing the already~awakened Energy field that we refer to and visualize as “The Ancestral Mermaid.” Those who feel called to contribute their presence to this conjuring are encouraged to have the following items:
paper and blue pen , Vessel (to hold water), High Frequency Water (Spring/Alkaline Water, etc)…and Glitter!
Suggested herbs:
Yarrow, Eucalyptus, Bay, Leaf, Peppermint, Jasmine, Lavender, Rosemary, Rose, Sea Salt
Participants are encouraged to access their inner {outer} mermaid via face paint, jewelry, color combination, glitter, costume, attire etc.
This is a virtual transmission and group participation is encouraged!
Parallel Workshops - Water Purifies: A Water Mandala Activation in the Year of the Firehorse with Desiree Mwalimu-Banks
Location: 9235
2:00 - 3:15 PM Pods, Integration & Social Time
Where does water speak in fire alchemy? How can the coherent relational fields of bees and marine mammals support us in thoughtfully tending our neuropsychic pathways? In this threshold era of accelerated planetary transformation, how do we remember water and land in reclaiming sovereignty, embodied creativity, and seated presence? Using the African-centered framework of Sakhu Djaer, we will collaboratively explore these questions through water and sound investigations. Our journey culminates with a screening and community talk-back of Colleen Grady’s short film: Songs For Earth & Folk (released in 2013/run time 10:46 seconds).
Location: Nalanda Cafe/Online (parallel; not hybrid)
2:00 - 5:00 PM Afternoon Communal: Barter-Verse Post Capital Market Returns
Location: Nalanda Events Center
6:00 - 7:15 PM NOMMO Cafe with Giselle Buchanan
Location: Nalanda Dojo (Hybrid)
Step into “NOMMO: Futures Spoken,” an open-mic portal where Black voices bend time, conjure worlds, and speak new realities into being. Rooted in the African epistemological concept of Nomo—the life-force of the spoken word—this gathering invites poets, storytellers, emcees, and dreamers to release language as cosmic technology, summoning liberation, memory, and possibility across galaxies.
7:30 - 10:00 PM BLACK ATLANTIS: Submerged Frequencies Dance Party with DJ STV
Location: Nalanda Dojo
“BLACK ATLANTIS: Submerged Frequencies” is a dance-floor descent into a sunken Black utopia, where the DJ channels tidal energy and sonic currents into waves of rhythm, echo, and reverb that flood the room with ancestral memory, ecstatic release, and submerged future worlds.
7:30 - 10:00 PM Sound Bathing
Location: Nalanda 9235
Day 4 - The Dream & Instant Strategy: Council of All Cosmic Beings and Rites of Re-Entry
Location: Nalanda Campus and Online
9:00 - 10:00 AM Morning Embodied Astrological Teaching with Ren Sills of Embodied Astrology
Location: Nalanda Campus , 9184 and Online
10:15 - 11:15 AM Parallel Workshops (choose one):
Parallel Workshop: TBA
Location: Nalanda Campus , Online
Parallel Workshop: Ancestral Somatic Dreamwork: Embodying Elements as Ancestral Dance with Dr. Anna Dinallo
Location: Nalanda Campus , 9235
This experiential workshop invites participants into embodied ancestral attunement through somatic practices rooted in Daoist five-element theory and decolonial healing frameworks. Through breathwork, authentic movement, ancestral dance, and guided meditation, we will explore how the body holds ancestral memory — and how movement itself becomes a portal through which the ancestors speak.
Authentic Movement, rooted in the Jungian tradition of active imagination, invites participants into a witnessed, non-choreographed movement practice in which the body is allowed to move from the inside out — following impulse, sensation, and the intelligence of the unconscious rather than external direction. In this container, ancestral energies are not merely remembered but embodied. We do not perform our ancestors — we become a living vessel through which they can finally, fully, move.
12:30 - 2:30 PM Intersectional Galactic Council of All Beings- 500 Year Plan Collective Grounding and Close of the Gates with Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish and Collective
Location: Nalanda Campus , Nalanda Events Center and Online
Our Luminaries
Desiree Mwalimu-Banks
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.
Orland Bishop
Orland Bishop is the founder of Shade Tree Multicultural Foundation, engaging in peace work with Los Angeles gangs and he working with social healing, youth initiation projects and research into esoteric and indigenous cosmologies.
Giselle Buchanan
Giselle Buchanan is a Jamaican 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 Cut, Hanging Loose Magazine, Nickelodeon, and MSG Network among others.
Monticue Connally
Monticue Connally is an African American shaman, herbalist, seer, father, husband, artist, student of plants, Afro Futurist, Medical Astrologer, Afro Dreamer and Author of the Afro Fantasy Walking Tree Oracle. He sees Afro Futurism and African Spiritual Traditions as essential tools for the liberation of modern minds. The Afro Fantasy Walking Tree Oracle traces elements, energies, herbs, planets and Blackness through a 9 realm spectrum to gain greater clarity and insight into health and wellness. Although Monticue lives in Barbados, he is a bio-regional herbalist who works primarily with the plants of Colorado. He has taught for many Colorado herbal schools and currently teaches for the Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism. He plans to expand his plant knowledge to include the plants of Barbados. Learn more about Monticue and his Afro Dreamer Medicine Society at AfrofantasyOracle.com
Kim Calder,
Kim Calder, PhD/MFA, is a writer, creativity consultant, editor, and astrologer, and member of the Embodied Astrology Practitioners’ cohort. They center somatic and ceremonial approaches to art-making, understanding the act of creation/narration as a collaboration with cosmic, earthly, and ancestral intelligences. Kim views astrology as a technology that can help us to connect with these forces in order to navigate challenging transformative processes at the individual and collective levels. Their philosophy is that art, material reality, and spirituality are always co-creating each other. https://www.kimcalder.com/about
Asia “Fermentasia” Dorsey
Asia “Fermentasia” Dorsey is a traditionally apprenticed Rootworker and Gut-Mind Nutritional Therapist from the Cheyenne, Ute and Araphoe territories. With her degree in Food Studies from New York University, Asia traveled across the globe to study with wisdom keepers in Australia, New Zealand, Ghana, India, Bolivia, Iceland, and more to discern the pattern language of healing with the help of animal medicine, culturally specific microbiome transformation and plant remedies. After reversing her own depression, Asia inherited the Five Points Fermentation Company from Chef Milan Doshi. She brought restorative, local, probiotic foods and brews to the people and ran a successful fermentation business serving bars, restaurants, grocers and direct to everyday folks. With nearly 10 years of experience regenerating bodies and minds, Asia built her wellness consultancy and school Bones Bugs and Botany to helps folks to access embodied liberation through food and herbal medicine. You can find her balancing botanical chaos and co-hosting the Petty Herbalist Podcast or bone-deep in stews stewarding her Food Genius Mentorship. Visit her at www.bonesbugsandbotany.com.
djones - Derrick Jones
djones (Derrick A. Jones) is a visual artist and fugitive scholar from Youngstown, OH. His work circulates through film, literature, and music, engaging blackness as a generative aesthetic and archival practice. Informed by the textures of quotidian black life and the formal rigors of an MFA and PhD, his practice moves into the fluid spaces of filmmaking, writing, and curation. This work is animated by the fugitivity of form and the rhythms of cultural memory—concerns that djones leverages toward worldbuilding and black study as a futurist orientation. He currently serves as the Creative Fellow for the liquid blackness project.
Adrian H Molina
Adrian H Molina aka Mo Speaks aka Big Baby Universe is a multimedia artist, poet, curator, and master of ceremonies. Molina’s creative work has been shaped by Chicano art, Hip-Hop, futurism, and the natural world. Molina is an Us@250 Fellow with New America, awarded for his work developing Future Town Tour with Warm Cookies of the Revolution. Future Town reimagines small towns in rural America in the future rather than in the past, building cultural cohesion and shared community across differences. Molina has a permanent installation at Meow Wolf Denver. His Living Word Scroll, 2015-2020 was recently on display at the History Colorado Center in Denver and El Pueblo History Museum in Pueblo, Colorado. He delivered the poetic invocation for the Denver Art Museum’s Martin Building in 2021, and was an artist in Residence with the Breckenridge Creative District in 2022. A room has been named for Molina at the Denver Foundation’s Casa Grande on Poet’s Row. He left social media in 2020 in an effort to be more present in the physical world.
Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish
Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish is an ethnofuturist mama and ecotopian dreamer preoccupied with ancestors, art, Environmental Justice, and the urge to help Earth (re)become paradise. By dialoguing with the past and present, she is scheming to reclaim our true inheritance while growing our imaginative skills for creating a more just and beautiful world.
Michelle brings over 25 years of experience uniting sustainability with social justice. Through her social impact business “Once and Future Green,” Michelle coaches Frontline communities, governments, and institutions, in community-led solutions with ecological design and anti-oppression tools. She facilitates a national fellowship, acts as an Environmental Justice advisor, is working on an ethnofuturist “People’s Plan”.
Michelle leads FLOWS, a Climate Justice organization building community leadership in sustainability and beyond in Colorado. She is a multi-ethnic artist and poet, recently featured at the “Matriarch” exhibit at Governors Island in NYC and currently featured at Meow Wolf Denver.
Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish
Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish serves as an associate professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Naropa University. He also teaches foundations in embodiment, contemplative learning and theory, diversity and social identity, Afrofuturism, African cosmologies, and Conflict Transformation.
Ramon supports organizations and institutions to embody more forward-thinking practices with interactive workshops, trainings and events. Bridging social justice, sustainability, the arts and cultural and symbolic technologies such as astrology, Ramon brings heart into all his consulting, education and advocacy. He is committed to community, cultural and cosmic regeneration through his work with organizations like Golden Bridge, Once and Future Green and Warm Cookies of the Revolution.
Sherri Taylor
Sherri Taylor is a coach, spiritual advisor, and lifelong student of what it means to be fully human.
Her work lives at the intersection of trauma-informed psychological insight, human development, systems thinking, and spiritual inquiry. For more than 15 years, she has worked with individuals and organizations navigating seasons of transition, grief, growth, and awakening — always with deep respect for personal agency and lived experience.
Sherri is also a student of folk traditions, dreamwork, astrology, and mysticism, which she approaches as symbolic and reflective pathways into deeper presence, meaning, and embodied knowing.
Like the work she offers, her life is a practice in staying with what’s real — listening carefully, moving at the pace of trust, and honoring the wisdom that already lives within each person.
Renee Sills
Renee Sills is a multidisciplinary artist, author, astrologer, educator, and the founder of Embodied Astrology. They are a second generation astrologer and lifelong student of somatic healing practices. They hold a BFA in Intermedia & Cyber Art and an MFA in Contemporary Art in Social Practice and approach their work with astrology and embodiment as processes of ritual performance and participatory art. The throughline of their work is ongoing investigation of interrelatedness, spirituality, mindfulness, creative agency, and the adaptive processes of the human body in contemporary landscapes of the anthropocene.
Renee has worked as consulting astrologer since 2014 and has read for thousands of clients. In addition to individual readings, they offer monthly and yearly sign-based horoscopes and collective readings, and they tend the Embodied Astrology virtual learning space – a vibrant and growing online community that celebrates and explores creative, experiential, fugitive, feminist, and somatic forms of astrology. Learn more about Renee here.
Yeye Luisah Teish
Yeye Luisah Teish is a teacher, dancer, storyteller, and leading high priestess in the Yoruba tradition. She is the author of several books on African and African American Spiritual Culture. They include “Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals” a women’s spirituality classic, “Carnival of the Spirit: Seasonal Celebrations and Rites of Passage”; “Jump Up: Good Times Throughout the Seasons with Celebrations from Around the World”; and “What Don’t Kill Is Fattening Revisited: Twenty Years of Poetry, Prose, and Myth.”
Ms. Teish was a member of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company at The Performing Arts Training Center in E. St. Louis Illinois; and was the choreographer for The Black Artist Group in St. Louis, Missouri. Presently she is the Artistic Director of Ase Theater and “The Women in White Peace Performance Group” in Oakland.
Her film and television performance credits include, the Oprah Winfrey Show, the Rob Nelson Show, the Rosanne Barr show (with Eartha Kitt), the Other Side, “Not A Love Story” and the Goddess Remembered film series(Canadian film board).
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, her father was an African Methodist Episcopal and her mother was a Catholic, of Haitian, French, and Choctaw heritage. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Spiritual Therapeutics from Open International University’s School of Complementary Medicine in Colombo Sri Lanka in 1993. She holds an Inter-Faith minister’s license from the International Institute of Integral Human Sciences.
Yeye Teish is an Iyanifa and Oshun chief in Yoruba tradition. She is one of the most well known Yoruba priestesses worldwide, who is celebrated internationally as a speaker, writer and ritual-maker. She is a powerful and incredibly inspiring teacher spreading her message of love and hope across the globe.
“All roads lead to paradise when you know how to walk.” – Yeye Luisah Teish
Jaguar Womban
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.
Jaguar’s journey into the mystical began when she was struck by a car while on foot and had a Near Death Experience (NDE) that left her in a coma with a diagnosis of Traumatic Brain Injury. This began her healing path of relearning walking, talking, reading, writing and social skills. She was first shuffled through traditional western medicine and rehabilitation and after not attaining the healing she desired, sought out a path of her ancestral traditions. On her journey, she experienced a solo pilgrimage of spiritual and physical transformation and formed The WOMBNation to bring the power of these life-changing rituals and her unique Jaguar Medicine to womb carriers worldwide.Jaguar is a Yoga Alliance certified Hatha Yoga instructor, Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) Yoga instructor, Thai Yoga bodywork practitioner and attuned Healer.
She has an MA in Creative Writing/Poetry and is a published, poet, powerful performer and Alumna of Naropa University. In both her healing work and creative expression, she incorporates her study and practice of Shamanism, Sanskrit mantra, sound healing, breathwork, Ancestral Plant Medicine, Movement, Creative Writing and Ceremony. She is based in Oaxaca, Mexico and works individually and in groups worldwide in Spanish, French and English.
Check: https://www.wombnation.org/mother
Aaliyah Oyaseeke Shivers
Amongst many things, Aaliyah Oyaseeke Shivers is a Black, queer healing artist and anthropologist. A Capricorn sun, mushroom like person, who thrives at the intersections of culture, systems, and Spirit. They enjoy playing, learning, and building through practices that honor ancestral technologies and holistic care as pathways to liberated bodies/spirits/ecosystems/realities. Through their organization Yowa Institute, they cultivate networks and offerings that support the reimagining of care work, research, and divination. They are excited to join this year’s festival and look forward to nerding out with fellow kin.
DJ STV
DJ STV bends time through rhythm—fusing Afro-futurist textures, ancestral pulse, and forward-leaning sound design into sets that feel like transmissions from a liberated tomorrow. His performances move between ritual and rave, weaving deep bass, global percussion, and cosmic atmosphere into a dancefloor experience that is both rooted and radically expansive.
Regina Smith
Regina Smith, aka Sovereign Blade/Weaver, embodies a crystalline intelligence whose lingual sword cuts through colonial illusions, rearranging institutions like code. A cycle hopper, her body a portal, she slips into timeline glitches gathering scattered black futures and weaving them into new post-human postcapitalist worlds.
Dr. Anna Dinallo
