Black Feminist Healing Arts Lab

We created the Black Feminist Healing Arts Lab in order to demonstrate and provide practical means towards liberatory health through intensive exploration of Black feminist healing arts. We understand healing arts to be creative practices that promote health, wellness, healing, and transformation. We also understand it to draw on the arts to analyze and recreate the everyday practices of Black women and their journeys with health, healing, and wellness. Drawing from a diverse array of disciplines including Medical Anthropology, Black Studies, Family & Community Medicine, Nursing, Social Work, Dance, Education, Social Medicine, Medical Humanities, and Public Health, this community-centered collaborative endeavor aims to develop novel, radical, Black feminist-inspired models of action for responding to inequity and injustice in medicine and healthcare.

The Black Feminist Healing Arts Lab is a space of refuge, and retreat for Black women scholars, creatives, and organizers. In coming together, we asked each invited healing artist to share their own healing journeys, experiences, techniques, and practices in Black feminist healing arts in order to lay the foundation for a comprehensive digital learning platform that will guide visitors through various Black feminist healing modalities, syllabi, and resources. As a first step, we are in the process of curating a Black Feminist Healing Arts interactive exhibition. The exhibition will be open to the public and showcase a representative collection of the healing arts explored during our retreat.

This project is curated by Drs. Adeola Oni-Orisan, Ugo Edu, and reelaviolette botts-ward and funded by the University of California Humanities Research Institute.