Negarra A. Kudumu, Founder & Director of Art + Heal

She is Manager of Public Programs (formerly Educator) at the Frye Art Museum. Negarra curates interactive, exhibition-specific public programs.

Negarra A. Kudumu is an independent scholar, published writer, and healer working at the intersection of art and healing with a focus on contemporary art from Africa, South Asia, and their respective diasporas as well as African Diasporic knowledge systems. She holds the title of Yayi Nkisi Malongo in the Brama Con Brama lineage of Palo Mayombe; she is a lay person in the Pimienta lineage of the Lukumi spiritual tradition; a practitioner of Muerterismo, Espiritismo Cruzado, and also a level II Reiki practitioner.

She engages with pre- and post-colonial artistic and spiritual outputs of West and West Central Africa, the Americas, and South Asia. She is interested in cultural products as evidence of intact connectivity to indigenous knowledge systems and non-western cultural canons. Negarra investigates the ways in which contemporary makers continue to adapt their ancestral knowledge and technologies - consciously and subconsciously - and (re)invigorate generative discourses around art, trauma, healing, liberation, spirituality, and sexuality.