STAFF
The Practice of Weaving
The practice of weaving is one of the oldest forms of art, one practiced by humans and animals alike. Woven baskets strong enough to carry water, woven webs strong enough to catch prey, and community networks that work as a web allowing us to hold one another when the dominant systems do not create life giving conditions. At the Weavers Project, we strive to honor the different forms of weaving that we all do on a daily basis – weaving ideas, stories, and community to create a tapestry of care and interdependence. Through the fellowship, donor facing programming, and ways we work, we experiment weaving our values and practices to create radical change for resourcing movements for liberation.
Anchor Team
The Anchor team is the guiding leadership team for the Weavers Project. In spider webs, the anchors are the points of strength on the edges of the web, that hold the web sturdy. Our Anchor team serves as the leadership body that engages in decision making and is instrumental in developing the next stage of the Weavers Project.
kai lumumba barrow
Program Director
kai barrow (b. 1959, Chicago) is a visual and performance artist based in New Orleans.
Barrow is interested in the praxis of radical imagination. Together with her four muses: Absurdity, Sarcasm, Myth and Merriment, she experiments with abolition as an artistic vernacular. Her sprawling paintings, environmental installations, found object assemblages, and social practice performances are created in traditional and non-traditional spaces to transgress ideological, geographic, and carceral borders. Deconstructing materials and locations associated with Black women’s labor, the work performs queer, Black feminist theory as an aesthetic genre.
A self-taught artist, barrow is a member of the Antenna Collective in New Orleans, and a founding member of Gallery of the Streets, a national network of artists, activists, and scholars who work at the nexus of art, political education, social change and community engagement. She was recently awarded an “Artists of Public Memory Commission” from Prospect New Orleans and has received residencies, fellowships, and awards from Project Row Houses; the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center; the Joan Mitchell Center; A Studio in the Woods; Alternate Roots; the Kindle Project, and The Weavers Project Fellowship. In 2020, barrow received a “YBCA 100” award for her work at the intersections of art and activism.
A social-movement organizer for over forty years, barrow has worked with numerous grassroots organizations including SLAM!, FIERCE!, Critical Resistance, UBUNTU, and Southerners on New Ground. She is currently the Program Director at The Weavers Project, which provides fellowships and residencies for Black Feminist artists.
For more information, see kailbarrow.com and galleryofthestreets.org.
La Tonya M. Green
Project Director
La Tonya M. Green is a New York City based results-oriented activist social scientist. She is a student of power and its uses. She serves as strategic thought- and learning partner to systems change and social justice leaders and influencers in the philanthropic, private, public, and nonprofit sectors. She focuses on data-informed, evidence-based decision-making and measuring organizational and program effectiveness and impact, particularly as they pertain to economic, political, racial, and social equity.
La Tonya is a principal at Social Science Ventures, a management consulting firm. She has twenty years of experience in management; research and evaluation; organizational assessment, development, and transformation; strategy, planning, capacity-building, and technical assistance. She has worked with the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, the New York City Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and the New York City Housing Authority. La Tonya's prior work experience also includes serving as the Director of Evidence, Knowledge, and Equity at the Full Frame Initiative and as the Director of Research and Evaluation at BCT Partners.
La Tonya holds a Bachelor of Arts in African-American Studies and Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a Master of City Planning, an Urban Design Certificate, and a PhD in Urban Sociology and City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Willa Conway
Resource Mobilization Director
Willa Conway comes from a lineage of fierce women – white settler colonial capitalists, writers, artists, addicts, mystics, truth tellers, humans who have harmed and been harmed. She has worked with Shakti Rising, Solidaire Network, Resource Generation, and generative somatics to look at and feel into the ways that wealth, gender, and trauma intersect across the economic spectrum. In 2017, Willa founded the Weavers Project, a community of artists, activists, donor organizers, and scholars working at the intersection of grassroots cultural organizing, transformational philanthropy, and interdependence. A longtime dancer, Willa believes that it’s hard to move anything into action without experiencing it in the body as well and the mind and strives to create work that creates that integration.
+ Thank you to Allen Kwabena Frimpong who supported Weavers with his expertise and care for two years. Learn more about Allen’s work here. And to Jennie Goldfarb for your contribution to the Project and for your continuous effort to amplify our work.