Grassroots MFA Thesis in Data Healing: MASS MoCA & Transmediale 202610 years since Yale made me lose my mind (…literally). The more candid backstory behind how guerrilla theory came into being the framework that is at the heart of my practice.
A few days ago, the Yale Daily News published an article revisiting the now-infamous Halloween saga of 2015 - which, amongst other things, led to one of Yale’s residential colleges that bore the name of a prolific slaveowner (Calhoun) being renamed in honor of the first woman to graduate from Yale with a PhD in Mathematics, Grace Hopper. My interview for that article marks the first time I am speaking publicly about what actually led to me leaving Yale — specifically, how the now-viral Facebook post I shared Halloween 2015 was both a domino in the series of racial reckonings that happened on campus, and also a catalyst behind my first major mental health crisis and consequent forcible withdrawal from Yale College.
I was kinda shook when I got the Google Alert notification about the article going live but, in the most encouraging turn of events, reading through it felt like a movie montage ‘wow, things really do/did get better in the end’ full-circle sequence. I’ve written about my mental health journey on here before, with varying levels of candor. And as it turns out, each time I did so functioned to peel away some of the shame I’d inherited about being ‘crazy’ & transformed that shame into the most generative of my teachers. This is the more candid backstory behind how guerrilla theory came into being the framework that my practice overall has been anchored within over the past ~7 years: I spent so many years being evasive around the degree to which my not having a degree wasn’t actually 100% by choice. The internalized ableism I had around having been hospitalized – quite literally presented with a blank sheet of printer paper while in the hospital & told that I could be discharged if I wrote *in pencil* on said blank printer paper that I intended to withdraw from Yale College – fueled years of angst-masked-as-ambition (which admittedly I don’t know will never fully go away). What I do know, though, is that said-angst ended up being transformed by its once masked-ambition into a genuinely alchemical and cellularly-recalibrating compass that led me closer to an understanding of what success-via-embodiment actually looked like for me, on my terms. Around this time last year I shared that I was starting a Grassroots MFA - a self-directed art program in Afropresentism & Data Healing, with an emphasis on Curiosity Stewardship. Next Jan/Feb I’ll be presenting my final (for now..?) projects for the Data Healing track of my g.MFA! ~ Co-curating transmediale 2026 (28 Jan - 1 Feb 2026), alongside Juan Pablo García Sossa as my self-directed ‘thesis’ in Data Healing, and debuting my first ever large-scale sculpture/installative work (on view 21 Feb 2026 - Spring 2027) at MASS MoCA, as part of the Technologies of Relation show curated by Susan Cross.
As a companion to trasmediale’s festival dates at the end of January, we’ve been moving at the speed of trust to put together a series of Research Netting Groups across what jpgs refers to as the ITCZ (Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone):
In September, we kicked off the Nkisi Netting Group with a trip to Papua New Guinea (a journey that unfolded with a potency that I am still in the depths of trying to integrate). JPGS is currently in Phuket, facilitating the SouthEast Asia node of our Netting Groups & at the end of November, we will be convening Nkisi Net in the Swahili Coast - from Nairobi to Lamu Island - with a cohort of architects. Some #PASSPostcards from the NkisiNet in Papua New Guinea:
In a surreal turn of events, upon returning to Kenya after PNG, I discovered that my grandfather was part of a delegation of “Commonwealth” (a.k.a. colony) subjects that embarked on a month-long countrywide tour of Papua New Guinea *in 1971*. Full circle in the most mystic of ways. Curiosity Stewardship started out as a largely speculative addition to my grassroots MFA’s freestyle infrastructure but ended up being the most essential ingredient in the whole experiment. There was a period of around 4/5 months where I pretty much entirely forgot that I was doing this MFA, but as it turns out curiosity is not something that disappears just because you’re not actively paying attention to it.
I tell people this all the time, but a lot of my ‘career’ really gained traction during the pandemic (as was the case for many thought-dealers, as my brother jokingly calls what I do lol). And what that meant was that I was just in my room, behind my computer screen, giving talks to audiences that I didn’t realize were growing in size / geographical scope. It was both a gift and the most peculiar stunting context within which to stumble into this whole thought-dealing trajectory – I both got to “speak” in more countries than I realistically could were I to have to physically travel there, but simultaneously had no real tangible sense of who or where I was sharing my work with/at. A big part of why I wanted to embark on this MFA is because there are so many parts of my practice that I felt I didn’t get the chance to truly develop on account of this glitch. I will sing praises for unschooling til my last breath, but there’s something about the focused outputs of ‘formalized’ education in particular that I realized I was lacking/yearning for more of. In 2022 I was on the verge of enrolling in the inaugural cohort of this MA in Reparatory Justice at the University of the West Indies (who were willing to admit me despite not having a Bachelor’s degree) but it didn’t end up panning out cuz of timeline / $$ misalignments. (And in retrospect / with the way my brain is set up . . . full-blown institutional education is a lil *too* rigid on outputs for it to be a good fit for me.)
This grassroots MFA was a gift because it’s an intention I set that I got to forget about & return to when I had the energy *with minimal catastrophic-guilt* - keeping it in the back of my mind just enough for the intention to materialize in the ways that were most intuitive & w/ minimal (internal + cosmic) resistance. JPGS, who I’m co-curating transmediale with, reached out to me in February to suggest that we apply for the curatorial position together. I owe him many times over for how the commitment and consistency he brought to those early application stages. I was so incapacitated by a generalized haze of dejection and precarity at the time that I could hardly conjure the motivation to submit the initial cover letter, and jpgs stepped up in the truest sense of the word - moving at the speed of trust - to see to it that we at least took the first step together. It wasn’t until we made it to the interview stage that I allowed myself to entertain the possibility of it becoming a reality & my brain afforded me some bandwidth to actually show up to the application with a sliver of hope that it wouldn’t just end up being the next in my series of unfortunate disappointments. We got the call letting us know that they had decided to select us for the position less than an hour after finishing the Zoom interview, and just like that, all of a sudden all of my random ‘aimless’ experiments had found a home - the research rabbit holes from the months I’d spent trying to figure out how and where I was going to live, escaping into hyperlink-labyrinths to get a bit of reprieve from the existentialism, & the experiments from the years before that, when I was doing more or less the same counter-existentialism side-questing after dropping out of undergrad. It was a very similar, generous + timely persistence that led to the MASS MoCA show* coming to life too. Susan Cross had reached out to me back in 2024 inviting me to contribute to the show, having been pointed my way by my Democracy Machine cohort-fellow Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, who’s also in Technologies of Relation. It took months and months of me self-sabotaging thru leaving Susan’s very thoughtful letters unresponded to (and then circling back 6-8 weeks later with opulent apologies/contextualizations, only to fall back into the cycle…) for me to realize that she wasn’t going to un-invite me just because I was unsure of what I would put together and if I was ‘ready’. Susan has arguably singlehandedly reaffirmed my faith in the ‘art’ world - embodying a patience and Southern-hospitality anti-pretentiousness that continues to inspire me to outgrow my own comfort zone of contrarianism + contradiction-fidelity - at least for long enough to actually let my ideas come to fruition without mapping out the 78035049 ways that those ideas will be null and/or void on arrival as an excuse to not try. I’m less worried about whether the piece will be ‘good’ or ‘understood’ simply on account of how generous/generative the process of rendering it into reality has been, & how it’s made me learn about + come to understand my own gravitational impulses more intimately. ** People share a lot about their “why’s” but in my experience not enough people share details around their “how’s” (re: art-‘career’ developments) – I’ve been learning a lot on that front from these theses.
I’m writing this from Berlin*, a city that has been bittersweet to fall in love with as much as I have this year. [* & now, editing it from Cairo]. As far as first-hand, everywhere-encounters w/ internationalism (relationally + programmatically) . . . Berlin (the pockets of it I nestle myself in, at least) is top two in the ‘Western’ world and most definitely not #2 (at least not as an East African . . . lol). I’ve been hyper fixated on this kofte/halloumi/makali sandwich from a spot here called Sahara Imbiss (IYKYK) - a chain of Sudanese restaurants scattered across the city (you can’t begin to imagine the sheer amount of glee that surges through my body every time I find a new branch of it and get to indulge in my #1 comfort food). Every time I walk in, there’s East African music playing and it smells like spices that are only familiar to me because of Eastleigh (and/or aunties I’ve come to know/been able to imagine the perfume-aura of thanks to my Sudan-laden TikTok algo.) My two closest friends here are both people I can speak Kiswahili with - the third is from Colombia and learning Kiswahili in Berlin all the same - pretty much everyone here speaks a minimum of two languages in general and I feel so cringeworthy American on a near daily basis cuz of small things . . .like realizing how little Europeans curse ? American finger-pointing-powered ‘vehemence’ governs algorithms and algorithms govern how culture distinguishes between culprits and co-conspirators, and so since I hadn’t been here since October 2023, Berlin felt like a place to be nervous about. Little things, like being able to drink tap water without there being microparticles of soot in it have helped in quelling that nervousness. Just thinking about an American airport right now makes my heart rate speed up. I thought I had grown agile to/around contradiction after the past year of writing about it, but Divesting from America has been the most humbling 401-Level crash-course in this whole praxis-based MFA mission. A couple of weeks ago I had a mini brat-fit (to myself, but a fit nonetheless) cuz I started this new TikTok page as an experiment - (moving the platform-focus / participatory immersion research of my Data Healing work from IG to TikTok) - but since I started the account in Kenya, it’s pretty much all the way shadow banned from the American algo/FYP. I had to get so real with myself about what it means to be geo-tagged as Kenyan and being excluded from my ‘usual’ base of access and potential-virality-cyberspace context as a microcosm of all the ways that my American passport shields me from ever really encountering globe-level mobility disadvantages IRL. Like wow I’m so damn spoiled and sheltered on account of being classified aka #tagged ‘American’. So used to being on the dollar-padded side of any given playing field. But alas . . . that’s a dispatch for another day (more likely a book . . . but we’ll see if I end up going straight into a grassroots PhD after Feb or if I’ll take some time off to commit full-time to TikTok addiction*.) Anyway, this dispatch mainly functions to share these updates + invitations to my g.MFA ‘graduations’ with y’all. I been quiet for a long while. I’m more spread thin than I ever have been. In that sense, I guess a thesis comes with the same exhaustion regardless of whether or not it was assigned to you or you assigned it to yourself! I hadn’t taken a long break from IG since 2023 and one unanticipated gift of being inundated with responsibilities is that I can’t even really afford the qi-investment that IG demands right now . . . (*I’ve found TikTok has a completely different energy-economy to it, but I’ll save that for later too . . .) As always / especially now, I welcome pen-pal letters (and lately been longing for song / podcast recommendations!) As you are probably noticing, I have a habit of taking many months to reply to things. Please know that my delay is in no way intentional neglect - as Ivie Ani so wisely put it, “if I owe you an email, imagine what I owe myself. . .” Yours Forever in Radical Love, Neema You're currently a free subscriber to Neema’s Substack. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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srijeda, 12. studenoga 2025.
Grassroots MFA Thesis in Data Healing: MASS MoCA & Transmediale 2026
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