Busy Being Black W!ZARD Studios

There is a divine vision for all of us and Mikael Owunna hopes his work can be a vessel for the transformation of our consciousness. Trained in the mechanics of bioengineering and empowered by the imaginative possibilities of photography, his artistic practice conjures queer Black people as embodied reflections of the black and brilliant cosmos. He does this work because he believes we, as queer Black people, are heirs to African cosmological traditions, which place us as the stewards of spiritual experience and as gatekeepers between the realms of the physical and the numinous. Our conversation explores how Mikael utilises technology to help us reencounter ourselves as divine beings, what 50 different expressions of queer Black liveliness taught him about his own capacity for self-actualisation and how art helps us push back against distorted images of ourselves.
About Mikael Owunna
Mikael Owunna is a Nigerian American multimedia artist, filmmaker and engineer. He is the Director of Mikael Owunna Studios, LLC., a full-service art production company, and the co-founder of Rainbow Serpent, Inc., a Black LGBTQ art nonprofit. His art emerges from the generative intersection of technology, art and African cosmologies, with the aim of reanimating our imaginative possibilities.
About Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land. 
Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork.
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Many of us have an intimate and ongoing relationship to shame and shame forms part of a very public conversation about what it means to be queer in the world. And until my conversation today, which is with social worker and psychotherapist Rahim Thawer, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what shame is. I was wrong. I wasn’t aware, for example, of how shame really operates, nor how it prevents the radical intimacy necessary for our collective liberation. Our conversation today explores how shame thrives on white supremacist ideas of desirability, how we learn to live with shame’s imprint and residue and the four defensive behaviours we exhibit to separate us from our shame. Rahim also shares why attempts to love ourselves before we can love anyone else will always leave us wanting; and says that contrary to the dominant culture’s insistence that shame is a problem for the individual to address in isolation, we must learn that love for yourself only develops in positive relationships with other people. For those who’d like to dive deeper, Rahim has a number of articles available on Medium.
About Rahim Thawer
Rahim Thawer works as a psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, facilitator and public speaker, sessional lecturer, writer and community organiser. Rahim is particularly interested in examining innovation in queer relationships. He has dedicated almost ten years to community organising with Salaam Canada, a national volunteer-run LGBTQ Muslim organisation. He was also a co-editor and essay contributor in a local history anthology entitled Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer.
About Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land. 
Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Aboud believes that art needs to be political. Whether in its critique of power or its provocation of joy and laughter, art must help move us towards freedom. Her cabaret-play, Splintered, gathers the first person experiences of 12 queer women in Trinidad and Tobago and weaves together these experiences to show how queer women living under threat of homophobic violence manage to cultivate and nurture intimacy, joy and resistance together. Emily says she made an explicit and intentional decision to avoid centring the trauma queer women know so well, deciding instead to let laughter, irreverence and satire act as the vehicle for a necessary critique of what post-colonial countries and cultures decide to hold onto. We explore Emily’s complicated feelings about carnival, her adoration of the mythic shapeshifter Lagahoo, and her challenge to what she calls the false binary between art and science. Emily says art and science are asking the same question in two distinct but connected ways and we discuss how Splintered is evidence of her scientific approach to theatre-making.
About Emily Aboud
Emily Aboud is a theatre director, a film director and a writer of mixed heritage, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, based in London. She won the Evening Standard Future Theatre Award in 2021. She is an associate artist at the Bush Theatre and Artistic Director of Lagahoo Productions.
About Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land. 
Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we think of the sweeping constellation of music that is Americana, we could be forgiven for thinking of it as a genre that doesn’t really speak to our lived experiences as queer Black people. Emerging in the 1940s as music borne of the weathered realities of rural life in the United States, Americana is perhaps most closely — if not accurately — associated with the region of Appalachia and the experiences of white Americans. But as my guest, Paula Boggs, makes clear: there is no Americana — no bluegrass, no country, no folk music — without the backbeat of African influences and the musical ingenuity of Black Americans.
Paula Boggs fronts the Paula Boggs Band, whose music is described as “Seattle-brewed soulgrass.” She is an accomplished musician and songwriter and the COVID-19 pandemic offered her an opportunity to reevaluate and research, §and to come into closer relationship with her ancestral lineages — an experience which animates Janus, the newest release from the Paula Boggs Band. Today, we explore how the pandemic has altered our understanding of place and belonging, how the segregation of public radio helped obscure the West African roots of bluegrass and why bluegrass is the genre Paula feels most at home within. She also shares the recipe for her 30-year relationship with her wife, a secret sauce which offers insights into how we might create a more graceful civic life together now and in the future.
About Paula Boggs
Paula Boggs served as Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary at Starbucks Corporation from 2002 to 2012. In 2009, NASDAQ©️ named her its top general counsel. She also had a 14-year career in public service, including as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and in various capacities as an attorney for the U.S. Army, the Department of Defence and the White House Office of Legal Counsel. She served eight years as a Regular Officer in the United States Army, earned Army Airborne wings and a Congressional appointment to the US Naval Academy – among America’s first women to do so. Paula is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and earned a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University. She was also an adjunct professor at the University of Washington School of Law and she served under President Obama on the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
About Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land. 
Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Theory and Play of the Duende, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca extolled the artistic necessity of duende – a poetic and artistic force that emerges from the darkness of our wounds. Lorca believed that art could only be great when duende was joined with wisdom and inspiration; the romance of angels and muses alone is not enough to create art that resonates with our fleshy, human experience. It was duende I thought of while in conversation with my guest today, Mojisola Adebayo. She is a performer, playwright and theatre maker, who often draws from the deep wells of Black pain to address the extractive practices that have robbed Black people of our lives and environments for 400 years. She marries these histories of extraction with the fantastical, adventurous and more-than-human to create art that challenges, provokes and inspires. Today, Mojisola takes us on a journey from Goldsmiths University to Antarctica, to space and back again, in a conversation that explores utilising performance to challenge the sanctity of whiteness, what an orgasm-seeking space odyssey tells us about the world-changing potential of queer Black pleasure, and how the reanimation of the life and story of Henrietta Lacks prompts us to consider our own genealogical and cosmic immortality.
About Mojisola Adebayo
Mojisola Adebayo is a Black British performer, playwright, director, producer, workshop leader and teacher of Nigerian (Yoruba) and Danish heritage. Over the past 25 years, she has worked on various theatre and performance projects from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. She has acted in over 50 theatre, television and radio productions, and devised and directed over 30 scripts for stage and video.
More information about STARS: https://tamasha.org.uk/projects/stars/
More information about Family Tree: https://www.atctheatre.com/production/family-tree-uk-tour-2023/
About Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land. 
Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, I’m in conversation with queer Black theologian and Anglican priest Father Jarel Robinson-Brown, whose theology and pastoral practice offer a re-embodied understanding of Christianity. Jarel is one of many theologians, poets and philosophers whose work has offered me an affirming and vitalising framework for understanding and practising my evolving spirituality. You’ll have heard me talk about author Sophie Strand, biological philosopher Andreas Weber and poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama, who joins me today for a conversation about his new book of poetry, Feed the Beast, which features poems wrestling with sexuality and religion. Today, we discuss the body as a site of divine and erotic intelligence, the potential of poetry to help us approach and unlock our desires and Pádraig reads four of his poems: “Monster”, “Exorcism”, “Someone” and “How to Be Alone”.
About Pádraig Ó Tuama
Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet and theologian from Ireland. His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland, The Harvard Review, Gutter and the Academy of American Poets. He is host of the podcast Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios and his newest collection of poetry, Feed the Beast, is available from Broken Sleep Books.
About Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land. 
Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices