A reclamation of self and a celebration of community, my work is a labour of love, informed by traditional storytelling modalities. As a multidisciplinary artist and community educator I am passionate about the uses of art to foster community development and advance anti-racist education, and political advocacy. My visual art practice spans photography, mixed-media collage, and creative direction/film to create afro-surrealist worlds. As a performance artist, I draw on poetry, dance, theatre and a neo-soul and jazz-inspired musical sound.

I have performed on over 100 stages across 6 cities, competed nationally at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and shared the stage with Dr. Angela Davis, and Grammy award-winning artist Yasiin Bey.  I often facilitate arts-based workshops, talk-balk sessions and performance spaces which center an anti-racist and Black Feminist praxis. I have curated performance showcases for artists both locally and beyond including Grammy-nominated, Harvard fellowAmir Sulaiman. During my tenure as the City of Edmonton Youth Poet Laureate, I developed a spoken word mentorship program for ACB youth encouraging self-expression, creativity and relationship building. I am the recipient of the Alberta Council for Global Cooperation’s Top 30 Under 30 award for my contributions to the UN’s sustainable development goals. I believe in the power of art as activism and have shared words before the Canadian Senate where I presented a policy brief for a nationwide strategy addressing Anti-Black Islamophobia.  Artistic creation empowers me to create stories that transform the world around me in the same way art has transformed me.

I am particularly inspired by the tradition of Afro-futurism and seek to imagine new worlds and carve pathways to liberation. My work celebrates the mundane, and positions our most human parts as revolutionary. As a survivor of sexual assault, and a Black, Muslim-disabled artist my work considers those that exist in the margins.  I am writing myself into this world through artistic creation—transmuting experiences of pain and survival into works of art that honour both my resilience and beauty. Utilizing a blend of visual and performance art I am continuing the lineage of transmuting the mundane into creations that call on us to witness ourselves. 

My approach to creation focuses on the intersections between many art forms and includes a catalogue of multidisciplinary work. My collection “Incantations of Black Love” created in collaboration with Black musicians and visual artists is “an unapologetic celebration of Black womanhood beyond survival” (Titilope Sonuga, Edmonton’s 9th Poet Laureate) and includes an EP, chapbook and short film. As as part of the Breaking Ground Art Collective, I co-developed an interdisciplinary theatre production exploring Blackness on the prairies through poetry, African and Caribbean dance forms and visual art. This project utilized art as a means of research and a tool to educate the broader Edmonton community on the rich histories of Black Canadians.