Mankwe Ndosi – Past Concerts

Mankwe Ndosi is a Culture Worker, Musician, and Composer. She uses creative practice to nurture and re-examine social patterns and relationships with her community, ancestral legacies, and the earth. She is an artist who embeds creative practice into transformative relational work. A member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Mankwe melds the improvising and compositional strategies the AACM is known for with the black women's ritual performance legacies of Laurie Carlos and Ntozake Shange. Her efforts have included producing a series of Great Black Music concerts highlighting black women composers, arts-rooted community wisdom sharing gatherings, serious play in racial equity workshops, and group healing workshops to support personal transformation from the inside out.

Her twenty years of creative community work have included program development, design, facilitation, teaching, and nonprofit leadership, including three years supporting independent producing artists as the Director of the Center for Independent Artists. Her work is aimed at nurturing creativity and healing justice through the interconnection and liberation of our personal and social structures, practices, and mythologies.

Ms. Ndosi has a Bachelor's degree in social and political theory focused on economics and women's studies from Harvard University. She also has extensive experience in facilitation and peer counseling and is actively training in trauma healing. Mankwe is a connector, a listener; a synthesizer, and a translator, a forager, a dirt-lover, a gardener, a cook, and a medicine maker focused on forgotten and marginalized plants, people, and ways of knowing.