CREATING POST-CAPITALIST FUTURES:

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist 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, Bayo Akomolafe is the Visionary Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains.’ Websites: www.bayoakomolafe.net; www.emergencenetwork.org.

Vanessa Andreotti, PhD, is one of the co-founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Art/Research Collective (decolonialfutures.net) and the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism. Vanessa is also a professor at the University of British Columbia and a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change.

Orland Bishop is the founder and director of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation in Los Angeles, where he has pioneered approaches to urban truces and mentoring at-risk youth that combine new ideas with traditional ways of knowledge. ShadeTree serves as an intentional community of mentors, elders, teachers, artists, healers, and advocates for the healthy development of children and youth.

Orland’s work in healing and human development is framed by an extensive study of medicine, naturopathy, psychology, and Indigenous cosmologies, primarily those of South and West Africa.

Alixa García is a Colombian born, globally raised, multi-disciplinary artist and movement architect whose work is imbued in ritual, spirit, and deep reverence for our Great Mother, Great Lover: our Earth. She is an award-winning activist, poet, and filmmaker. She is also a professional writer, visual artist, musician, and facilitator.  She is co-founder of Climbing Poetree and Truthworker Theater Company, and founder of Alixa Garcia Studio. Garcia’s words, visions, and music continue to travel the world on a mission to transform destruction with creativity.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse—Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota—is an author, international speaker on Peace, Indigenous and Mother Earth perspective. A survivor of the “Reign of Terror” from 1972 to 1976 on the Pine Ridge,  Cheyenne River and Rosebud Lakota Reservations in South Dakota and the US Bureau of Indian Affairs Boarding and Church Missionary School systems. Tiokasin has a long history of Indigenous activism and advocacy. He speaks frequently at venues such as Yale University’s School of Divinity, Ecology and Forestry, Union Theological Seminary focusing on the cosmology, diversity and perspectives on the relational/egalitarian vs. rational/hierarchical thinking processes of Western society. Tiokasin was a 2016 Nominee for a Nobel Peace Prize from the International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy. 

Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of the 30year-old award-winning “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”), a weekly one-hour live program syndicated to over 120 public, community and commercial radio stations in the US and Canada.

Dr. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, and professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics. He is Associate Editor of the journal World Development, and serves on the Advisory Panel for Harvard-Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice. He is the author of The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Penguin, 2017), and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020).

Claudio Miranda invited friends thirty years ago to form a band to promote and provide a culture of solidarity, culture, joy and community support to the population of the favelas of São Paulo Brazil.

Claudio started making music at the age of 9 in a neighborhood considered by the United Nations to be the most violent place in the world for two decades, and his collective dream was to “change the place without moving from there.”

Resmaa Menakem is a visionary Justice Leadership coach, organizational strategist and master trainer. To help Justice leaders really realize their potential in the areas of Equity & Racee, Resmaa created cultural somatics which utilizes the Body & Resilience as mechanisms for growth. Resmaa is a dynamic and fully engaged justice leadership coach who is dedicated in partnering with leaders whose intention is to assist others in leading better lives and organizations. Resmaa is passionate about coaching those courageous leaders who dedicate their lives toward making the world a better place. He is author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.

Lynn Murphy is a strategic advisor and thought partner with foundations and not-for-profit organizations. She was a senior fellow and program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation where she focused on international education and global development. She resigned as a ‘conscientious objector’ to neocolonial philanthropy. Lynn currently co-directs the Transition Resource Circle and is the co-author of Post-Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse. She holds an MA and PhD in international comparative education from Stanford University.

Brontë Velez

Brontë’s work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, curator, trickster, educator, jibarx and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration and death doulaship. 

mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life —

V (Formerly Eve Ensler) is the Tony award winning playwright and author of the Obie award winning, theatrical phenomenon, The Vagina Monologues translated into 48 languages, performed in 140 countries along with many other plays. She is the author of a number of books including her latest best sellers, The Apology, translated into nearly 20  languages, and In the Body of the World. She is founder of V-Day, the 24-year-old global activist movement which has raised over 120 million dollars to end violence against all women (cisgender and transgender), gender diverse, girls and the planet—and founder of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries,  as well as a co-founder of City of Joy. She writes regularly for The Guardian. Her new book, Reckoning will be published in 2023 by Bloomsbury.