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Team Category: Advisory Board Members

Isira_Headshot
May 31, 2024

Isira Makuloluwe

Biography

With more than 25 years of experience in contemporary dance and theatre, he directed his dance company VIVID.danse in France and made over 20 original dance works including commissioned works for the Lyon Biennale, Geneva Opera Ballet and Phoenix Dance Theatre (UK). He is winner of the Best Choreography Prize at the Kuopio International Festival Choreographic Competition (Finland, 2003).

Since 2008, Isira had developed Dynamic Releasing©, an evolving, innovative, and inclusive training system in contemporary dance, that allows participants of all levels to take control of their own movement journey, developing technical skills quickly by interfacing their innate trajectories with his creative input. The method also supports technically trained dancers and elite athletes of varying backgrounds to be energy efficient in performance, understanding the sensory connection with instinctively used biomechanical pathways.

He has taught this method in South Africa, South Korea, France, Norway, Denmark, England, Portugal, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Argentina and Brazil.

With an MA in TV Journalism and Documentary Film, Isira also makes documentaries and experimental films specialising in intimate storytelling, social conflict and transformation, and drama-inspired narratives. In 2014 he won the British Journalism Training Council Best Documentary Award for his film Shadow of the Bull, a controversial film about a young Spanish bullfighter from an inner city project.

Living in Portugal since 2011, Isira is the Artistic Director of Positivenomad Studio, a centre for movement research located in the Ericeira. Focusing on emerging artists in dance and performance, Positivenomad offers short internships and artistic residencies involving mentoring, creative strategy, and production assistance.

By tiekie
team-1
September 2, 2020

Peggy King Jorde

Biography

Peggy King Jorde is the principal of KING JORDE Culturals and a global authority on African burial ground memorialization. 

KING JORDE Culturals is a multidisciplinary consulting practice supporting marginalized & underrepresented communities, design professionals, developers, civic authorities, and various stakeholders in cultural heritage protection, community engagement, and memorial design. 

She is a Harvard University Loeb Fellow recognized for her extraordinary activism in the movement to save New York City’s African Burial Ground. She served under three New York City Mayors. Harvard Magazine’s article “Life By Design” chronicles King Jorde’s journey from her native Albany, Georgia, to her fellowship pursuits at Harvard School of Design. Peggy is no stranger to activism. She is the daughter of the late legendary African American Attorney C.B. King, Sr., who defended Dr. Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights Movement. He was the first Black man since the U.S. Reconstruction era to run for governor of Georgia, paving the way for Stacie Abrams. Today, a U.S. Courthouse is named in his honor. After being named Special Adviser to New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins, King Jorde was appointed Executive Director for the African Burial Ground Federal Steering Committee, during which she prepared the master plan for memorializing the historic landmark. Due to her advocacy and commitment to community and cultural heritage protection, Peggy left city government to consult full-time. Her appointment as Director of Memorialization enabled her to lead the national design competitions, resulting in the United States’ first African Burial Ground National Monument & Interpretive Center honoring enslaved and free Africans in New York City. After research was completed at Howard University, she was a pivotal contributor to the planning committee for the repatriation ceremony for more than 400 ancestral remains reburied into New York City. 

Skills

Activism
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Civic Project Management
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Consulting
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Experience

ing Jorde combines 30 years of experience in the art & architecture, civic project planning, development, design, management, and construction. She has provided project oversight at New York’s most iconic cultural institutions, museums, and public art projects. She has served and chaired non-profit boards for academic institutions and cultural organizations, including co-chair of the Malcolm X Memorial committee with Malcolm’s late widow, Dr. Betty Shabazz, and Chair for The Classical Theatre of Harlem in NYC.

Aside from being a subject expert consulting on burial grounds and memorial design development throughout the U.S. and globally, including the Dutch Caribbean (Sint Eustatius) and the U.K. (St. Helena), Peggy is a producer, protagonist, and documentary discussion-guide author for the British documentary “A Story of Bones, ” which premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival in NYC and on American television PBS’ POV in 2023. In March, the Preservation League of New York State will honor Peggy at the 2024 Pillar Awards in New York City.

By tiekie
team-2
September 2, 2020

Kenneth Cuvalay

My name is Kenneth Cuvalay. I was born in 1952 and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius (former Netherlands Antilles). My nationality is Dutch and my roots are Afrikan, living in the diaspora. My parents were both of Afrikan origin. My mother was born on the island of St. Kitts and my father on St. Eustatius. I grew up in a poor family with thirteen children. At the age of eight, I started working to support our family economically. Only at a later age did I go to school and develop myself. Since then I have been fighting for equality and human rights, and against injustice toward the most vulnerable people in our communities, the Afrikan people.

Political and Social Work

I was at the cradle of the main founder of the establishment and development of psychiatric and addiction care at St. Eustatius and Saba. It is important that there is access to care, the implementation of the care, and the methods used are geared to the needs of the population on the islands. The Dutch government and many mental health care institutions in the Netherlands pay absolutely no attention to this. I sought connections with health organizations in the Caribbean. In the Netherlands, too, it is important that transcultural care is given attention. People of Afrikan origin have different ideas about health, being sick, and about treatment Methods.

Ideology

The basis of my ideological conviction is founded in the struggle of my life against economic inequality and the legacy of Dutch Transatlantic colonialism and the enslavement of the Afrikan people, the legacy of colonialism that still forms the basis for structural underdevelopment, exploitation, institutional racism, and discrimination, which continues to marginalize the Afrikan people and the continued domination of the people within the communities of the so-called former Netherlands Antilles, by destroying their cultural identity, heritage, and self-determination. In other words, it is a heinous crime against humanity that continues against Afrikans.

Relevant positions

  • President St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance arose from the protests against the unethical archaeological excavations of our ancestors at the 18th century Afrikan Burial Ground Golden Rock on St. Eustatius.
  • Founder and president of “The Quill” St. Eustatius for Addiction and Psychosocial Care.

  • As a senior psychiatric nurse on seconded by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS) to the Caribbean Netherlands to set up addiction and psychiatric care there. In recent years I worked as a clinical manager in the Windward Islands (St. Eustatius and Saba) at the organization Mental Health Caribbean.- Founder and coordinator of the grassroots movement European Anti-Racism Network (EARN). This is a movement of black FNV trade union members in the Netherlands who fight against institutional racism in the labor market, the workplace, and within the FNV itself.

  • Founder and coordinator of the grassroots movement St. Eustatius Awareness and Development Network (SEAD).


Expertise

  • Afrikan history, spiritual development, Afrikan-centered education, and the rewriting of our history that European and Western colonial powers have distorted. Mental health and addiction care. Identity and awareness of strength and self-esteem.
  • Institutional racism in the labor market, workplace, and education systems. Transatlantic slave trade and slavery history and the influence on our thinking, acting, and how we see and develop ourselves as a community.
  •  Human rights and social and economic inequality for the African residents of Curacao, Aruba, Bonaire, St. Maarten, St. Eustatius, and Saba in the Dutch overseas territories under Dutch rule in the Caribbean

General note

The explanation of why our group within UCF and other Afrikan grassroots’ movement spell Afrika with a “k” instead of a “c”.

This spelling is based on the following insights:

  1. It is a Pan-Afrikan spelling which relates both to the Afrikan continent and to the Diaspora;
  1. It reflects the spelling of “Afrika” in all Afrikan languages;
  2. It includes the concept of “ka”, the vital energy that sustains and creates.

Ka The Soul, there are three elements to the Egyptian concept of the soul: Ka, Ba and Akh.

  1. Ka is the life force or spiritual double of the person.
  2. The royal Ka symbolizes a pharaoh’s right to rule,
  3. A universal force that passed from one pharaoh to the next,

 

The five parts of the soul are:

Ren, Ka, Ib, Ba and Sheut

  1. The meaning of ren is gantong, which can be translated as “to open oneself to. affected by the spiritual, human, and natural beings in the surrounding world. word ren can be traced to the word shi f3, which referred to the spirituals,
  1. Ka The Soul. There are three elements to the Egyptian concept of the soul: Ka, Ba, and Akh. Ka is the life force or spiritual double of the person. The royal Ka symbolized a pharaoh’s right to rule, a universal force that passed from one pharaoh to the next,
  1. Ib (Heart) The heart is the seat of a person’s personality and spirit, and so the most important part of the body. It was not removed during mummification, but was protected by a powerful amulet – the heart scarab,
  1. Ba, The Ba is most often translated as ‘soul’ and was a human-headed bird the aspect that could speed between earth and the heavens and, specifically, between the afterlife and one’s corpse,
  1. Sheut – Shadow Believed to be the shadow of the person. The Sheut was the the essence of the person and the person could not exist with them nor could a the person exists without their shadow.
By tiekie
team-3
September 2, 2020

Dudu Msomi

Biography

Dudu Msomi is the Founder and CEO of Busara Leadership Partners, a research-orientated strategic advisory and consulting company whose expertise is to facilitate the development and effectiveness of leaders to achieve their desired goals.

Msomi is a sought-after and powerful Strategy Facilitator, Corporate Governance Expert, Leadership Coach, Diversity & Inclusion Strategist, Business Advisor, Keynote & Guest Speaker, and Writer. Dudu is an Adjunct faculty member at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS). Dudu presents a series called Wisdom Personified Conversations with Dudu Msomi on the YouTube channel ‘Wisdom Personified.’ 

Skills

Srategy
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Leadership
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Public Speaking
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Qualification

  • B.A. Hons. (University of Natal, Durban)
  • Postgraduate Diploma in Advertising and Marketing (AAA School of Advertising)
  • Postgraduate Diploma in Corporate Governance (University of Johannesburg)
  • Programme for Management Development and a Master’s in Business Administration (GIBS).

Dudu is an Institute of Directors (IOD) Fellow and is an independent non-executive on boards, including the South African Reserve Bank (SARB). She is also the Chairperson of the SARB Retirement Fund. Msomi Chairs the Social and Ethics Committees of the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) and Office of the Pension Fund Adjudicator (OPFA. She is on the Vodacom Foundation Advisory Board and a Trustee on the Humulani Trust (of the listed company, Invicta Holdings). She is a part-time Commissioner on the KwaZulu Natal Provincial Planning Commission, an advisory body to the Premier.

By tiekie
team-4
September 2, 2020

Michael ‘Mawazo’ Dean

Biography

Michael ‘Mawazo’ Dean is an African American and Afro-Choctaw artist, writer, musician, and curator. Born in San Diego, California, 27 km from the United States/Mexico border, Michael spent his childhood in the American West Coast before relocating to Metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia as a teen. Both completing his Master of Arts in Anthropology at California State University Fullerton in 2024 and embarking on Doctor of Philosophy studies in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Riverside, Michael’s area of focus encompasses the continental and global African Diaspora. He is a descendant of Choctaw and Chickasaw Freedmen who had arrived in pre-statehood Oklahoma, Indian Territory through enslavement and the Trail of Tears alongside Five Tribes tribal members of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Cherokee, and Muscogee/Creek Nations; these Freedmen later co-established the historical Black towns of Oklahoma including Black Wall Street. Michael traces his African heritage to Mende, Fulani, Mandinka, Yoruba, and Benga peoples through his paternal lineage and Malagasy peoples through his maternal lineage. 

His diverse experience as a creative professional where music, performance, and the arts intersect with culture, grassroots activism and civic engagement motivates his multidisciplinary approach to exploring the past and contemporary worlds of African descendant populations in global and local contexts of being. Featured for his work in music and community engagement, Michael has appeared in AFROPUNK, Atlanta Intown Paper, and has held internships with Blind Ambition Management, Sony Music, and Aspire TV. An alumni of the Billboard-featured Joel A Katz Music & Entertainment Business program, he also earned his Bachelor of Science in communications with a public relations concentration at Kennesaw State University. 

Michael engages anthropology with multimodal foundations exploring decolonial, ethnographic, autoethnographic, indigenous, and humanistic approaches to scholarship. During his anthropological M.A. studies, he has explored topics ranging from Soul Train and Social Bonding in Music and Dance to post-Apartheid Decolonial Discourse on Namibia to African American Placemaking. 

 

Volunteer Skills

Music
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Research
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Curation
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Research

His MA thesis research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to explore the African American farming tradition, the contemporary landloss crisis, and culture-centered community interventions rooted in indigenous knowledge systems (IKS). Michael’s ethnomusicology doctoral dissertation is titled Uhuru Afrika: Africana Expressive and

Spiritual Tradition and the Black Liberatory Transcendence of Transregional Funk. Michael studied the Swahili language and culture while living in Tanzania and Zanzibar as an international fellowship student where he received the name ‘Mawazo’ which symbolizes mindfulness and thought. Michael is a proud member of the Chickasaw and Choctaw Freedmen descendant community, the Association of Black Anthropologists, the International Civil Society Working Group for the Permanent Forum for People of African Descent, and The Tiekie Box Project.

By tiekie