What might our futures look like when Black imagination, collective wisdom, and radical self-love lead the way?

Join Design Futures Aotearoa (DFA) and Black Creatives Aotearoa (BCA) as part of the inaugural Aotearoa Festival of Black Arts for an immersive evening of conversation, creativity, and collective dreaming — as we explore how Afrofuturism can help us decolonise the future and reimagine what liberation, belonging, and justice might look like in Aotearoa and beyond.

Featuring internationally acclaimed artists and visionaries Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology) and Junauda Petrus (The Stars and the Blackness Between Them), this intimate event weaves together art, storytelling, and interactive practice to invite new ways of thinking about identity, healing, and the worlds we’re yet to create.

Expect an evening of provocative artist talks, participatory experiences, and whanaungatanga — a space to connect across cultures, share ideas, and imagine together.

Event Highlights:

Opening Karakia & Welcome
Hosted by DFA and BCA, setting the tone for shared reflection and connection.
Artist Talks with Sonya Renee Taylor & Junauda Petrus
Exploring how Afrofuturism inspires their creative journeys toward decolonisation and freedom.
Interactive Creative Experience
A participatory session inviting us to collectively practice futures thinking through art and imagination.
Panel kōrero + Share back
Reflect, question, and co-create visions for decolonised futures.

About the Artists:

Sonya Renee Taylor is a New York Times best-selling author, world-renowned thought leader on racial justice, body liberation and transformational change, international award-winning artist, and founder of The Body Is Not an Apology (TBINAA), a global digital media and education company exploring the intersections of identity, healing, and social justice through the framework of radical self-love.

Sonya is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestseller The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love (1st and 2nd editions), Your Body Is Not an Apology Workbook, Celebrate Your Body (and Its Changes, Too!), poetry collection A Little Truth on Your Shirt, The Book of Radical Answers (That I Know You Already Know) (Dial Press 2023), and The Journal of Radical Permission co-authored with Adrienne Marie Brown. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and honours over the past two decades, from her National Individual Poetry Slam Championship award in 2004 to her 2016 invitation by the Obama administration to participate in the White House Forum on LGBT and Disability Issues.

More recently, she was awarded a Global Impact Visa where she served as an inaugural Edmund Hillary Fellow in Aotearoa (New Zealand) from 2017-2020.

Sonya’s work also consists of her ongoing public video series “What’s Up, Y’all?”, which tackles topics including but not limited to white supremacist delusion, “cancel culture”, abolition and accountability, attacks on reproductive freedom, and the existential twin crises of COVID-19 and climate chaos. The 2020 uprisings against anti-Black terrorism also inspired her to co-found The “Buy Back Black Debt” reparations inspired financial initiative that in October of 2020 facilitated the buyback of over half a million dollars of debt held by Black people.

Junauda Petrus is an American author, filmmaker, Creative consultant and multi-dimensional performance artist. She was born on Dakota Land, Minnesota and is of Afro-Caribbean descent. Her debut novel, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, was a winner of a Coretta Scott King Honor Award.

In February 2021, Petrus announced that she was working on a film adaptation of the novel. She is the author of “Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?” A picture book with Kristen Uroda, based on a poem she wrote, published and performed of the same name following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Junauda’s work centres around Black wildness, ancestral healing, and “pleasure activism”.

Her works incorporate themes such as black diasporic futurism, female friendships, queerness, black community, identity, and healing.

About the Co-hosts:

Design Futures Aotearoa builds community and capability in long-term, inclusive, and intergenerational futures thinking across Aotearoa.

Black Creatives Aotearoa champions Black artistry, joy, and excellence through storytelling, performance, and cultural exchange.