The Team
We are...
Karen Miranda Augustine
Founding Artistic Director
Karen Miranda is a visual artist, writer, and death doula whose work is influenced by the sacred arts. Focused on memorialization, gender, loss, and interconnectedness, her projects reference African spiritual traditions and diasporic practices to facilitate peer bereavement and communal reflection. She holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from York University.
karenmirandaaugustine.com
Bushra Junaid
Advisor
Operations & ADINKRA Programming
Bushra is a multidisciplinary artist-curator whose work probes the African diaspora and the history of Atlantic Canada, memory, identity, and placemaking. The author of The Possible Lives of WH, Sailor, she is a former arts manager at the Ontario Arts Council and holds an MA in Architecture from the Technical University of Nova Scotia.
@rahbush7604
Thandy Younge
Advisor
ADINKRA Programming
Thandy is a queer, seventh-generation African-Canadian. A health-care worker and end-of-life doula, her background in community support, advocacy, activism, and case management has made her an expert in finding creative, client-centred solutions. She works primarily with people who are Indigenous, refugees, street-involved or homeless, and from LGBTQ+ communities.
Chrystal Toop
Advisor & Ally
Chrystal is an Anishinaabekwe-Euromix matriarch and member of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation. A social services worker and storyteller committed to restorative healing justice, she is a co-founder of Aunties on the Road and the Indigenous Death Doula Collective. She has trained over 1,500 BIPGM doulas globally.
blackbirdmedicines.ca
Bonnie Whitehall
Advisor & Ally
Bonnie is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores grief and loss, ritual and ceremony, aging and invisibility, and feminist storytelling. A teacher for 18 years, she holds an MFA in Documentary Film Media from Toronto Metropolitan University. Currently, she is filming a documentary exploring mother-daughter relationships through the lens of art practice as healing.
bonniewhitehall.com