Sawdayah Kaliaha

Sawdayah is a Gullah woman based in upstate South Carolina, by way of Detroit and Brooklyn. She is a farmer, educator, cook, storyteller, sometimes muse/model, sister, daughter, friend.

She is an alum of Howard University and received her BA in Africana Studies and studied Agricultural Education at North Carolina A&T State University. As a farmer and agricultural/environmental educator, she has created a curriculum about & taught classes and workshops in sustainable agriculture, botany, agricultural history in the African Diaspora, and food systems to intergenerational groups at D-Town Farm in Detroit, MI, The Youth Farm (formerly located in E. Flatbush, Brooklyn), Farm School NYC, the DreamYard Project in the Bronx, NY, and other community spaces since 2011. As an advocate for sustainable, community-led gardening, Sawdayah served on the board of directors for the Brooklyn-Queens Land Trust (a community-led land trust that preserves 37 community gardens) for six years and led the organization as board president for one year.

As an emerging artist, Sawdayah weaves together written and spoken word, prayers, gardening, and cooking to tell personal stories of the creation of home and the reclamation of her own Nature. Through her art, she aims to entice you to reflect on how critical relationships create our homespaces and how they contribute to ‘home’ existing/persisting, in spite of neocolonization, gentrification, and displacement. Her political and artistic focus is on homes within the African Diaspora. Her own critical relationships have her grappling with the idea of home with other people of color who face hegemony.

Sawdayah's favorite artistic medium is plants. She believes they are the pipelines to all of the "nutritive & curative substances" located in the Earth (summarized from 'Self-Healing Power and Therapy: Old Teachings from Africa' by Dr. K. Bunseki Fu-Kiau, Ibayé). The practice of being in community with people, plants, and Earth, for each groups' edification and healing, is her contribution to Black liberation. She is honored to have been called to be in relationship with land and its assemblages within ecosystems.

Representation

Freelance

Contact

direct email: africanherbsmaam@gmail.com

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