About the Just Praxis Circle
The Just Praxis Circle is an initiative of the Imagine Just Community program. It is a collectively led and diverse coalition of artists, cultural producers, and creatives. This is a container for living out our transformative, liberatory values and shifting power and agency to those historically excluded from making decisions about the solutions, interventions, and resources people and communities of color need within the arts and culture space. This circle includes grantees of the Imagine Just Community-Advised Fund for BIPOC Arts Organizations, an Imagine Just Artist Fellow, and BIPOC creatives from across the sector.
Objectives:
-To create and sustain a collective of people who are committed to the Praxis of Justice in their everyday lives.
-To use Just Praxis retreat spaces to rest, restore, and practice for our future without White supremacy.
-To use Just Praxis retreat spaces to respond to issues happening in real-time with people and organizations.
-To create a space where people can refine who they are within their communities and outside of their paid work.
Meet our Circle Holder
Sojourner Zenobia (they/them), Sojourner has completed decades of somatic performance training at Marymount Manhattan, Pearl Ubungen’s BFA at Naropa University, The School at Steppenwolf and Pantheatre’s Roy Hart school in Paris. They have trained in connecting with ancestors, nature and the spirit world and healing facilitation at Life Force Arts in Chicago, they trained in circle keeping with Circles and Ciphers and Kay Pranis, and in 2021 they completed Tracee Stanley and Chanti Tacoronte-Perez’s yoga nidra Training.
Sojourner found spirituality through the practice of presence as a performer. This portal of presence opened up the Buddhist path to them and the Buddhist practice opened the healing of connecting with the earth. They became the spider that they were terrified of as a child and began to weave together everything that gave them feelings of trust, hope and freedom. They are now an embodied sacred space facilitator, installation artist, experimental vocalist, body mover and earth steward.
For the past 10 years Sojourner has held a meditation and ritual space called “Stillness,” where they have guided hundreds of BIPOC queer folks in deepening their connection with ancestors, nature and personal spiritual gifts. Sojourner is currently exploring stillness by trusting the wisdom that emerges in their body at quiet moments and by trusting the relationships in their life.
