Founder- Ebony Williams
In looking at the various positions I’ve held and fields in which I’ve been employed, projects I’ve undertaken, one might find it difficult to see the thread that links these seemingly disparate things together. My CV notes that I graduated from the High School of Fashion Industries with a major in Fashion Design and then went to Wheaton College through the Posse Foundation, an opportunity that allowed me to develop skills as a dialogue facilitator and workshop developer. While at Wheaton I majored in Sociology and minored in English Literature and spent a winter and summer working at Sarah Burke House, one of the three largest women and children’s shelters in New York City. After graduating college, I stayed on to work at Wheaton’s Marshall Center for Intercultural Learning as the Program Coordinator for Women and Gender Programming. In this role, I decided to pursue my love for writing and apply to graduate programs for an Masters in Fine Arts. In Fall 2010, I moved to Los Angeles, CA to attend the California Institute of the Arts. CalArts is a unique place structured with an intentionality to house all the arts under one roof to promote an interdisciplinary environment. While I entered CalArts aiming to continue working on a sci-fi novel, I found myself needing to tell my story.
There also seemed like no better place to do art based healing work than in an art environment where vulnerability is commonplace. My MFA manuscript, entitled How to Build A Ragdoll, is a work of creative non-fiction, a memoir that weaves together my personal narrative as a survivor of sexual abuse and those of the generations of women who came before me. I tell our stories, the stories of our individual and collective bodies through the object of a ragdoll. In order to do this work, I developed a series of writing exercises that eventually I attached to the building of a body. While initially I didn’t realize this but all of the exercises are in conversation with Paulo Friere, Bell Hooks, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and artist and survivor SARK. All of these individuals and many who are not named here influence much of what I do and as a result are reflected in the feminist, womanist, engaged, and culturally relevant approach present within my workshops and reflected in the experiences that participants have.
I began to teach this process to youth who have experienced violence in their communities along with people going through divorces, dealing with an empty nest, and survivors of sexual assault and other bodily trauma. I have worked with people ages 6-70 and across identities including but not limited to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, religion, language, and cultural background.
After receiving my MFA in 2012, I began working as the Program Coordinator of The Queer Resource Center of The Claremont Colleges. Here, I oversee LGBTQIA programming across the five undergraduate and two graduate institutions. Now, almost two years later, my workshops have grown and as a result the impact has grown as well. Quickly, seeing the possibilities for merging this process with other disciplines, specifically psychology, I saw the need to go back to school to attain a background in psychology. Currently, I am earning a Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy specializing in African American Family Studies to fully equip me with the skills and knowledge necessary to best serve individuals and communities through this work.
The link, the thread, the piece of yarn, as I like to think of it, that connects my life work is my belief in process. While a generality, it’s common that we, as human beings, spend much of our time focused on the problem and the solution to obstacles that arise from living. The middle part, the journey we go through to reach our desired end point is where we learn the most. This is where we are presented with the most opportunities to grow and experience our humanity. This is also where we spend the least amount of time reflecting. This is the focus of my work, to create opportunities for individuals to indulge in the luxury of process.
There also seemed like no better place to do art based healing work than in an art environment where vulnerability is commonplace. My MFA manuscript, entitled How to Build A Ragdoll, is a work of creative non-fiction, a memoir that weaves together my personal narrative as a survivor of sexual abuse and those of the generations of women who came before me. I tell our stories, the stories of our individual and collective bodies through the object of a ragdoll. In order to do this work, I developed a series of writing exercises that eventually I attached to the building of a body. While initially I didn’t realize this but all of the exercises are in conversation with Paulo Friere, Bell Hooks, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and artist and survivor SARK. All of these individuals and many who are not named here influence much of what I do and as a result are reflected in the feminist, womanist, engaged, and culturally relevant approach present within my workshops and reflected in the experiences that participants have.
I began to teach this process to youth who have experienced violence in their communities along with people going through divorces, dealing with an empty nest, and survivors of sexual assault and other bodily trauma. I have worked with people ages 6-70 and across identities including but not limited to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, religion, language, and cultural background.
After receiving my MFA in 2012, I began working as the Program Coordinator of The Queer Resource Center of The Claremont Colleges. Here, I oversee LGBTQIA programming across the five undergraduate and two graduate institutions. Now, almost two years later, my workshops have grown and as a result the impact has grown as well. Quickly, seeing the possibilities for merging this process with other disciplines, specifically psychology, I saw the need to go back to school to attain a background in psychology. Currently, I am earning a Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy specializing in African American Family Studies to fully equip me with the skills and knowledge necessary to best serve individuals and communities through this work.
The link, the thread, the piece of yarn, as I like to think of it, that connects my life work is my belief in process. While a generality, it’s common that we, as human beings, spend much of our time focused on the problem and the solution to obstacles that arise from living. The middle part, the journey we go through to reach our desired end point is where we learn the most. This is where we are presented with the most opportunities to grow and experience our humanity. This is also where we spend the least amount of time reflecting. This is the focus of my work, to create opportunities for individuals to indulge in the luxury of process.
