The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering
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A collective laboratory for aligning your labor with black feminist values in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Instead of engineering AI prompts, we meet twice a month to experiment with the erotic prompts we desire to weave into our worldbuilding practice. Join us in transmuting AI shame and anxiety into erotic self-respect and agency.
Learn MoreMary W. Jackson, "NASA’s first black female engineer in 1958", Source: NASA
THE LABORATORY OF EROTIC ENGINEERING ISÂ
An Incubator For Our Poetry
Whether your poetry is teaching, writing, divination, facilitating, leading, editing, curating, coaching, researching, parenting, care work or making art...
The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering is where your sacred labor gets held and re-imagined. Â
Want to learn more before enrolling?
Keep ReadingThe Politics Of Labor And Refusal In The Age Of AI
Join Us In Dreaming Beyond The Temporal Logics of Capitalism
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WHAT IS EROTIC ENGINEERING?
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Erotic Engineering is the practice of aligning your work with black feminist values in the age of AI.
Sangodare Wallace of The Quirc App reminds us “Black feminism” and “Black feminist” are describing a politic, not a demographic.
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We understand our worldbuilding can be informed by the politics of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy — inside Seeda School we choose the politic of black feminism.Â
The Laboratory Of Erotic Engineering Is For You If...
You are ready to align your productivity with your erotic capacity and not the engine of empire.
You’re unsure, confused, hopeful or quietly relieved about AI and want to replace silent shame with erotic self-respect.
You are willing to let your creative curiosity be the only qualification you need to follow your desire to re-imagine your relationship to work.
You love your work and the ecstatic practice of sharpening your skills. You understand AI might make your work “easier” but robs you of the turn on inside “rigorous ease” and flirtatious friction.
You feel called to create a cultural shift through your creative labor at the scale of worldbuilding, epigentics and fractal possibilities. You understand this is what ancestral stewardship looks like in the present.
You are intuiting the most erotic response you can conjure to this revolutionary crisis1 is poetry.
You find yourself thinking, “What if it really is up to us?” Your internal monologue sounds like “What if June Jordan and Alice Walker are right and we really are the ones we’ve been waiting for?”
You feel the subtle and loud indoctrination of AI and it feels like a firm “No”2 for you at this time.
An Erotic Engineer is re-imagining and/or practicing an approach to work in alignment with black feminist values.Â
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IF YOU ARE AN EROTIC ENGINEER THIS LABORATORY IS FOR YOU.
Why Now?
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"Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions."
I heard this from Qi Lu; I'm not sure what the source is. It got me thinking, though — the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.
— Sam Altman, 2013 (Sourced from introductory epigraph to Empire Of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (2025) by Karen Hao)
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It is time to start shaping a collective voice of critical conversation around the church of AI.
A church seemingly eager to convert us into believers at every second of the day.
We believe in rivers.
We believe in oceans.
We believe in forests.
We believe in clean air.
We believe in eachother.
Do we believe in AI?
Not so fast.
We are the riotous chorus3, our collective mouth is speaking 4 and we are saying not so fast.
We are saying...
Let’s slow down.
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“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”Â
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 — Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power" (1978)
Engineering Through The Years
CIVIL ENGINEERING | 1747
Concerned with the design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure like roads, bridges, and buildings.
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | 1847
Focuses on the design, analysis, and manufacturing of mechanical systems and devices.
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING | 1884
Deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism.
INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING | 1908
Optimizes complex processes and systems to improve efficiency, productivity, and quality in production or operations.
AEROSPACEÂ ENGINEERING | 1958Â
Concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft — the astronautics branch, is often colloquially referred to as "rocket science".
COMPUTER ENGINEERING | 1971
Integrates electrical engineering and computer science to develop computer hardware and software.
EROTIC ENGINEERING | 2025
The practice of aligning human resources with the values of poetry and black feminism.
Through the years there have been developments in Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, etc.
Now Seeda School brings you Erotic Engineering.
Someone looked at the world and said, “this is a mechanical engineering problem”, we are looking at AI and saying, “this is an erotic engineering problem."
For Electrical Engineering the material in question is electricity.
For Civil Engineering the material in question is infrastructure.Â
For Erotic Engineering the material in question is labor.
We have ample evidence of engineering shaping and re-shaping the world.
What the age of AI is demanding is poetry.
Biotechnology and Software Engineers shape the world with code — genetic and computational.
Erotic Engineers shape the world with creative labor.
Both engineers have the power to impact our biology, relationships and the planet5.
Code and poetry can sustain life but, as we can see, software and language can also kill life.
This life being rivers and wetlands, maroons and black folks.
So what are we going to do about it?
Let’s run some experiments…
How The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering Works
All programming takes place on the 2nd and 4th Thursday of every month at 12pm EST
12 PM EST / 9 AM PST / 11 AM CST / 5 PM GMT
Workshop
2ND THURSDAY @ 12PM ESTÂ
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Erotic Engineering is the practice of aligning your work with black feminist values in the age of AI.
Inside The Laboratory you will be invited to attend live monthly workshops on Erotic Engineering.
An "Erotic Engineering Guide" full of spells, strategies and seeds accompanies each workshop — think black feminist scientific research paper meets poetry workbook.
Each monthly Workshop, Guide and Open Studio accumulate into a collective Erotic Engineering Manual for re-imagining your labor and creating the most erotic job you can dream up inside the age of AI and beyond.
This erotic job title becomes your Element X6.
Open Studio
4THÂ THURSDAY @ 12PM ESTÂ
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SHOW
Show an erotic experiment you’re working on OR share an erotic case study by a peer, cousin, auntie, elder, ancestor, artist, abolitionist, teacher, parents, worldbuilder, etc. that you’re inspired by at the moment.
Share your screen or read out loud.
Bring what you’re working on or nerd out on something that’s supporting your breath this month.
We welcome both with deep gratitude.
TELL
Tell us about your experiment and the feedback you’re seeking (if any).
Tell us about the parts that feel erotic and the parts that are challenging you, the questions you have and the revelations you’re grateful for.
Workshop Seed Data
FROM THE EROTIC ENGINEERINGÂ LIBRARY
 Inside The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering we study black feminist biotechno-worldbuilding as citational "seed data" for our monthly erotic prompts and experiments.
"The Uses of The Erotic, The Erotic as Power" by Audre Lorde
1978
"Human Computers"
MARY JACKSON 1921-2005
The Captive Maternal: Anti-Fascists in Search of the Beloved by Joy James
2026 (FORTHCOMING)
Dark matter objects
Technologies of capture and things that can't be held by Neta Bomani
2018-PRESENT
Glitch Feminism:
A Manifesto by Legacy Russell
2020
"Where Do I Want A Slave?: AI and the White Male Imagination" by Sonya Renee Taylor
2023
Alligator Bites Never Heal by Doechii
2024
Love Craft County Season 1, Episode 7 — "I Am."
2020
Henrietta Lacks
1920-1951
Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi
2021
Cassandra Press by Kandis Williams
2016
"The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto"Â by Martine Syms
2013-12-17
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. ButlerÂ
1993
Torkwase Dyson’s "Black Compositional Thought"Â
ONGOING
Code Noir, Fictions by Canisia LubrinÂ
2025
A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging by Dionne Brand
2021
Dismantling The Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time by Rasheedah Phillips
2025
"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: an american grammar book" by Hortense SpillersÂ
1987
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
2020
"I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance" by Sojourner Truth
1864
Neptune Frost, an Afrofuturist sci-fi musical co-directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman
2021
Baby Suggs Sermon in “The Clearing” of Beloved by Toni Morrison
1987
"Poetry Is Not A Luxury" by Audre Lorde
1985
"Sylvia Wynter: Beyond man | DigiDocs"
2025
Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick
2021
Listening to Images by Tina M. Campt
2017
Kameelah Janan Rasheed: The Edge of Legibility | Art21 "New York Close Up"
2021
"It's very hard to understand what our reality is." | Artist Julie Mehretu | Louisiana Channel
2023
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments:Â Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women & Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
2020
Freedom Farm Cooperative | Fannie Lou Hamer’s America
2022
How a Group of Women in This Small Alabama Town Perfected the Art of Quilting | Op-Docs on The Gee's Bend QuiltersÂ
2018
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline GumbsÂ
2020
Black Trans Archive by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
ONGOING
Iyapo Repository
ONGOING
Data Healing Workbook by Neema Githere Siphone
2024
"The Creators of Seeking Mavis Beacon on Using AI, Authenticity, and Femme Documentarians", a conversation with Olivia McKayla Ross and Jazmin Jones
2024
Add additional Erotic Engineering resources on black feminist labor and biotechno-worldbuilding to our collective Are.na board.
“The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t happened yet but must. It is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration. It’s the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now.”
 — Tina Campt, “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity”, Listening to Images (2017), p. 17.
The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering Schedule
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All programming takes place on the 2nd and 4th Thursday of every month at 12pm EST
12 PM EST / 9 AM PST / 11 AM CST / 5 PM GMT
Workshop
2ND THRUSDAY AT 12PM EST
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Erotic Engineering is the practice of aligning your work with black feminist values in the age of AI.
Each live workshop is accompanied by an "Erotic Engineering Guide" for running monthly prompts and experiments inspired by black feminist worldbuilding.
Open Studio
4TH THURSDAY AT 12PM EST
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Open Studio is a show and tell space.
“Show” erotic experiments, yours or worldbuilding projects you’re inspired by.
“Tell” us about the experiment, and if you’re the worldbuilder running the experiment, tell us about the kind of feedback you’re looking for (if any).
Solidarity Pricing
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Solidarity pricing tiers and descriptions are borrowed from black feminist worldbuilder and Seeda School alumni nènè myriam konaté. If you're interested in The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering you might also be interested in their offering, The Clap Back Manifest(o).
The Laboratory of Consent
THE LAB IS A MONTH TO MONTH MEMBERSHIP
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Life happens, seasons change. There are no refunds after you have enrolled into The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering and accessed the Seeda School library, but you can cancel your membership at any time! Join us for a month or the entire year. We aim to practice with you for as long as it feels desirable and accessible.
"Ayana has created a thriving Black feminist counterpublic that combines the speculative imaginary with the power of presence and action to manifest worlds that exist outside of and beyond oppressive systems, reminding us that we don’t have to cut off any parts of ourselves in the work.
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As a participant in Seeda School over the past year, I have found that accepting Ayana’s invitation into communal worldbuilding has completely transformed the way I think about both engaging with and funding my creative practice. Their gentle invocation around returning consistently to our work to build a nurturing cadence of outreach via the weekly dispatch, with its focus on curiosity and research, as well as their guidance on developing an income-generating offer has shown me the value of cultivating a creative ecosystem where all parts feed into and nourish each other.
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I came for the emphasis on grounding our art in interdisciplinary wildness and opacity. I stay for the soft weave of community that grounds us all together in what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “an interdependent ceremony.” Ayana and my fellow worldbuilders are holding each other through this time of escalating genocide and rising fascism worldwide and together we are creating full universes of possibility to, in Christina Sharpe’s words, “imagine otherwise.” Join us?"
Elliott Silverstein
About Your Erotic Engineering Guide Â
My name is Ayana Zaire Cotton and I’m a writer, worker and worldbuilder from Prince George’s County, Maryland, U.S. on the ancestral, unceded lands of The Piscataway. Â
In 2021, while a fellow at the Recurse Center and a creative biotechnology resident at Ginkgo Bioworks I developed Cykofa Narration, a storytelling software and methodology that relies on ecosystems reverence, citational care, re-appropriation, and computer collaboration.
My self-published, science fiction novella, Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story, was co-authored with a JavaScript program I developed that split paragraphs at punctuation marks and randomly recombined sentences using shuffling algorithms.
Through foraging seed data related to biotechnology, poetry, abolition, black southern folk art and more—YouTube transcripts, pirated PDFs, website text, lyrics, scientific research, etc.—were blended into a non-linear, choral voice and my co-author "Cy" emerged. In many ways, Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story was not written — it was grown.
I used the Cykofa Narration software to co-author the science fiction novella that seeded this school.
Since then, I feel like I have come to embody the Cykofa Narration software and Black Feminist World Database I programmed 5 years ago.
I catch myself spitting out a tapestry of black feminist quotes, texts, poems and song snippets cataloged in the database at random — while writing, talking and teaching.
At times, I feel like a human synthesizer, a black feminist database made of flesh. As a black woman, I do feel a level of kinship and solidarity with computing machines. While I am not an AI expert, I trust myself to be a guide inside the age of AI.Â
I trust myself to facilitate conversations about AI and black feminist worldbuilding with care, curiosity and attentiveness. It is my hope that through the Laboratory of Erotic Engineering you come to trust yourself to do the same.
Over the past decade I have created print publications showcasing the art and politics of Chocolate City, launched a workwear clothing line as a meditation on black feminist labor, taught software engineering to hundreds of students marginalized by race, class and disability, tended to an ecosystem of art practice ranging from ceramics and film photography to abstract painting and performance — eventually, I seeded a school for worldbuilding. Emerging from my speculative fiction novella, Seeda School is a community of practice supporting black feminist worldbuilders inside the daily ceremonies that allow them to root in their rigorous ease, resourced desire and erotic power.
Folks work with me because I make the growth edges we fear, irresistible.
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Photograph by Stephen Miller. Custom workwear created by Ayana Zaire Cotton from her previous business, Zaire Studio.
WebsiteAbout Seeda School  Â
Seeda School is located in Cykofa, a parallel universe suspended amongst the past and the future where cornrows are cryptography keys, data farms are data forests, the weaving loom is a computer and chain link fencing from demolished prisons is used as architectural membrane woven with plant life.
Seeda School is animated by a black feminist, abolitionist imagination.
We specialize in black feminist speculative practice, worldbuilding, business development and labor studies.
Our mission is to make revolution irresistible through the framework of black feminist worldbuilding.
Our vision is a generation of present, paid, powerhouses building infrastructures of mutual aid and cooperative labor in alignment with black feminist values.
“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.”
 ― Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara
Do I have to attend every live session?
What is the billing frequency of The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering?
Do you offer scholarships?
Is Seeda School open to non-black worldbuilders?
What Erotic Engineers Are Saying About How Seeda School Has Transformed Their Relationship To Work
"After grinding for over a decade in the nonprofit sector, I needed support building a viable, self-directed career path to generate income rooted in my values and creativity. The Seed A World Retreat offered both the practical tools and community encouragement I was seeking to heed the creative call I have been feeling. Now I look forward to sharing this work that feels personally terrifying and necessary, and I believe in my ability to do it using the Seeda School tools. During the retreat, Ayana held space with such admirable curiosity and generosity! If you want an experienced, informed, Black feminist, imaginative hype-person to put a loving battery in your back, sign up for the Seed A World Retreat immediately."
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— Jasmyne Gilbert, Winter 2024
“Ayana Zaire Cotton, is, to me, a being whose radically tender ways of loving, teaching, and questioning mirror the revolutionary labours of love of bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, and the list goes on. Through Seeda School, Ayana plants seeds of responsible hope, of revolutionary reimagining(s), and most importantly, of communal (and personal) pursuit(s) of the erotic into the body, mind, and soul of whoever has the chance to waltz with their teachings, with their being. Being a student of Seeda School is constantly being reminded that one’s desires are needs, and therefore that we — as people — have the power to materialize the conditions we yearn to have in order to thrive, to be free. Receiving teachings and exchanging with Ayana and the lovely beings who tap into their care-full-y crafted [offers] is a blessing that keeps on giving, and I trust that this will remain the case in near and distant futures.”
Gloria-Sherryl François (G L O W Z I), Fall 2023
Chinyere Erondu, Fall 2023
"Words cannot express enough how grateful I am for the blessing that is both Ayana and Seeda School. Enrolling in the retreat was an immediate yes for me — where the weekly meditations and facilitations from Ayana felt like sacred invitations to return — return to community, return to self, return to Spirit, return to our gardens. Like The Artist's Way, but through a decolonial Black feminist lens, I continue to find Seeda School and its Retreat as an evergreen gift and artistic nourishment that, as a result, enriches the tending of my spiritual and literary practice — The Conflicted Womanist.”
“It was such a pleasure being part of Seeda School retreat and be in community with a cohort of talented, caring and loving souls. This offering is a soothing and refreshing balm to each and everyone wanting to delve deeper into their inner being to bring out unknown treasures to the world. Ayana, the creator and facilitator of the retreat is its living proof. They are a bottomless well of inspiring, exciting, creative, experimental and spirit-led knowledge and I’m deeply grateful for their work and their willingness to share with us all that they know with so much grace and care.”
Keren Lasme, Fall 2023
Taylor Rae, Fall 2023
“I find it difficult to express in words just how impactful the Seeda School Retreat was for me as a clayworker, herbalist, teacher, and activist. Seeda School contextualized our work as multidisciplinary artists in the revolution and helped us all to abandon mentalities of scarcity that are upheld by colonialism and white supremacy. Ayana has put so much time, effort, and care into every piece of her retreat and it shows. Even as someone who already had a creative offer established, I gained so much wisdom from the content and discussions that I am confident will only improve the success of my offers, along with one of the most tender, caring, and uplifting communities that anyone could ask for. I am infinitely grateful for the work Ayana does in bolstering us artists and creating containers for the radical dreaming of better worlds.”
“Being led through the Seed A World Retreat by Ayana offered me the sea I know I can rely on to float me above all that attempts to drown me. Each of the nine action steps helped to buoy my practice & deep sense of embodiment utilizing the full power of Audre Lorde's uses of the erotic.
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Ayana's excavating groundwork reminds us that the ability to float already resides in the power of our expansive breath. If we can dream it, then it is safe to trust that it is already done for not just ourselves but folks dreaming of the work we are producing.
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The world you desire to build already exists within you & the worldbuilding framework helped me realize that our work can support so many others if we break through the fertile ground where we stand alone. In fact, through the worldbuilding framework, Ayana facilitates that we are never truly alone because the Sankofa sensibility circularly connects us to our past, present, & future.
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If you're ready to invite folks to wade into the sea of your worldbuilding & transformative offer then sign up! Trust that when it rains it pours & your abundant desires will grow & be witnessed by the outstretched limbs of folks in the Seeda School community with you.”
Kay Brown author of Assemblage: Baby's Breath
“The Seed A World Retreat offered by Seeda School was an invitation to revisit the primordial womb; a safe and warm place for meaningful growth and expansion of our deepest desires. Ayana's passion and deep community care shone through as she guided/facilitated the cohort to transform the seeds of our deepest desires into tangible and beautiful offerings to the world. The carefully curated Retreat Workbook allowed us to seed, tend to, grow (and prune when necessary) our ideas into structured next steps. I'm so happy to have had the opportunity to commune with other like-minded, community-oriented folk who share the same passion for building worlds that provide ample space and opportunity for radical, free existence and communion.”
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— Yen C, Fall 2023
"The Seeda School experience has been such an affirming and generative experience for me. I am often seeking out classes and opportunities to learn new skills, be in process with my peers, and engage in self-development and personal growth. My experience with Seeda School, via Ayana's generous facilitation and framework, felt so deeply aligned with my values, my creative praxis, and my worldview. Guided by the brilliant offerings of Black feminists, Ayana has cultivated such a sacred space with an inspiring cohort of people. Since participating in the cohort, I have revisited the curriculum, and it continues to be a transformative guide as I chart my path forward."
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— Jessica Valoris, Winter 2024
"The Seeda School is unlike anything I have experienced before. It's a mix of personal, intimate, and necessary inner groundwork, visioning for the future, and practical tools for business and financial sustainability, all within a liberatory framework of black feminism and worldbuilding. I found it to be such a necessary container for reflecting, visioning, developing ideas, dreaming up possibilities and then bringing them to life with the many tools that are offered throughout the course. Ayana is a brilliant and generous facilitator, and has thoughtfully curated a safe community of support among like-minded artists and creatives. I am telling everyone I know about Seeda School as I feel like all interdisciplinary artists and creatives need this kind of facilitated retreat experience to bring their ideas to life and offer them to the world."
Steph Rue, Winter 2024
"11/10 recommend joining The Retreat with Ayana Zaire Cotton. It was deeply transformative: from re-rooting into new affirmations that better support our world-building to having the guidance and community support to actually build the thing. In 9 weeks!
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For years, I've worked on creative projects but avoided creating a framework because I was afraid it would feel too contrived for both me and my clients. The Retreat changed that: I now feel clear-minded and excited about guiding others through my process (I have a process!). I can't believe what we were able to create in 9 weeks together, piece by piece, week by week.
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The community was one of my favorite parts of The Retreat: it felt living, breathing, and magical. The poetry! The bookish fanfare! The expressions via multi-media! Every week, I felt completely inspired by how the fellow retreaters were translating their interests, desires, and visions into offerings rooted in their rituals, too.
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Ayana's teaching structure, content, and language left me feeling focused and encouraged—two vital things you need when you're world-building—after every class, every session, every week. I loved that their entire approach was informed by Black feminist teachings and guides that moved us through each topic. I come back to our Worldbuilder's Handbook daily, if not for the templates, then for the affirmations.
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They've created an incredibly important, helpful, and inspiring space to participate in if you want to deeply resource your own world-building. Again, 11/10, y'all."
Karly Borden
“The violence is endless under empire and white supremacy, but so is our capacity to imagine new worlds and to love on each other” – a thought Ayana offered us early on, amid the grief, heartbreak and rage at the apocalypses taking place close and far, is also the best summation of this heart-and-possibilities-expanding retreat. Under Ayana’s effervescent, loving, wise guidance and expansive vision, these 9 weeks were a space for us to practice loving ourselves – breathing through fear, taking our desires, curiosities and oddities seriously, seeing a divine throughline in our journeys, choosing to start without having all the information – in order to answer the call from our people, past and present, and bring about the futures we need today. I told everyone I care about of the gift that is the Seed A World Retreat, looking forward to revisiting our session recordings and completing the worksheets (that I know my life depends on). I am so grateful I followed my intuition (and desire!) and chose to invest in myself through this course. I am grateful and forever charged/changed by this offering, that Ayana had dreamt up and powerfully-beautifully woven into being.”
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— Aisha Jandosova, Fall 2023
“Ayana has created a retreat that is immensely valuable. Seeda School has been able to anticipate needs that I was uncovering myself with richness and depth in ways I never expected! I wholeheartedly recommend this retreat for creatives ready to immerse themselves in their hearts desires.”
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— Vanessa Murchie, Fall 2023
"The Seeda World Retreat has been instrumental in bringing my coaching program to light. When I joined, I had just drafted my framework and had a fuzzy idea for my offer. Every single week of the Retreat helped me clarify and strengthen my initial ideas. It felt like starting with a block of marble and then sculpting and chiseling until what was truly important emerged.
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I loved the structure of the Retreat. It has everything you need to birth your offer and business. We had the tools and time to work autonomously and in-depth. Then, we had our amazing Open Studio Calls, where the communal revolutionary spirit made its magic. In between, the asynchronous support via Discord and email was a guiding light and helped me feel never alone.
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Today, just two weeks after the Retreat's end, I started softly launching my program. I may not have been here without the Retreat!
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More than this, the 9 weeks together have been a time of creative expansion and personal and political evolution for me. I'll always be immensely grateful to Ayana and the marvelous human beings I was honored to have by my side during this journey."
Giada Centofanti
"Seeda School gathered me and all the threads of my creative practice. I came in with an idea and left with a digital course rooted in ease and pleasure. The workbook is beautifully laid out to include a framework for building out a curriculum, sustainable marketing plan, and sales funnel. Ayana's affirmations each week are a remedy to the uncertainty I experience beginning something new. This retreat has been grounding and deeply supportive."
Brandi Cheyenne Harper, Winter 2024
“This Seed a World Retreat has been been such an eye-opening journey that has shown me that I don't have to fear claiming the things that I am because the current world that I participate in says that I can not be all the things that I am. Ayana, it is clear what you want to put forward - a world where everyone is fully themselves and living in a world of love. I felt that throughout the experience, and felt as if I was being asked to take a chance in believing in and being a part of that type of world - a world built from love. Through a facilitator of love, a community of love, and words/frameworks of love, I felt affirmed and empowered to go on an be the interdisciplinary researcher, director, curator, and writer that I want to be. I feel as though I have so much of the foundational tools and essence from Seed a World and I can wait to launch, and see all the other worlds that are launched from this beautiful retreat.”
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— Bo Dautruche, Fall 2023
“Through the Seed A World Retreat, Ayana offers rich, juicy, tangible frameworks for attendees to tap into our deepest desires so that we may then be led by them in our endeavors to develop and share values-driven creative offers. Each retreat session was equal parts meditation, sermon, and playdate. It was an invaluable experience to imagine within a world where Black feminism was the bedrock, where attendees could start replacing self-rejection and scarcity with self trust and generosity, where showing up fully for our practices would sustain our livelihoods in the ways we dream of and deserve. I’m eternally grateful and excited for how what I learned in the Seed A World Retreat will propel me into a more expansive and abundant future.”
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— Dkéama Alexis, Fall 2023
"Seeda School is the most nourishing, electric, brilliant, inspired, held space I have been lucky enough to be a part of. I entered the retreat from the depths of a creative winter, and Ayana built the container for a true and revelatory spring. She has architected the balance of structure, rigorous tools, juicy inspiration, accountability, and relational support that will help you (finally) recognize and birth the thing that has been calling you. And more than that, Seeda is the invitation to manifest the luscious version of a life you didn’t know you were allowed to have."
Olivia Vagelos, Winter 2024
Footnotes
- The language of "Revolutionary Crisis" was lifted from this Instagram reel by Jamila Bradley (@brightblackhoney) on "World Building & The Profane". The caption reads, "We need to get familiar with the ordinary levers of power and areas of resistance within our every day life. We need to learn to recognize and seize opportunities that allow us to act as transgressors against immoral systems. The system needs us compliant. We need to get comfortable accepting the consequences."
- The sentiment that we get to say "no" to AI is inspired by this Instagram reel by Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) on what AI refusal practices can learn from black refusal. The caption reads, "My most daring idea is to refuse. Refuse that the end is here. Refuse that AI is the future. Refusal is hope and refusal is in my bones. In the tradition of every badass Black revolutionary women — from Sister Harriet to Septima Clark — I humbly refuse to let the wealthy and powerful tell us that our future is theirs. The future is what we make it."
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Invoking the "riotous chorus" comes from Saidiya Hartman's book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019). On pages 347-348 in the essay titled “The Chorus Opens the Way” she says, “The chorus bears all of it for us. The Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance within the enclosure. What better articulates the long history of struggle, the ceaseless practice of black radicalism and refusal, the tumult and upheaval of open rebellion than the acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure? The chorus is the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or the tragic hero, but one in which all modalities play a part, where the headless group incites change, where mutual aid provides the resource for collective action, not leader and mass, where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution.”Â
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The language "our collective mouth is speaking" is directly pulled from Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo's invitation titled “IT’S ALL OUT OF MY ARMS, OUR COLLECTIVE MOUTH IS SPEAKING”, "An Activated Honoring” in celebration of the Dear, Mazie exhibition at ICA curated by Amber Esseiva. This program honored "the builders, crafters, sculptors, poets, educators, activists, and web keepers of our futurity, bringing together the practices and language of Amaza Lee Meredith, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Ayana Zaire Cotton, Alexis De Veaux, and Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters of The Black School, into a spell and ceremony to build with."
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“Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities…And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.” — Sylvia Wynter, “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile A Mad Man” cited by Katherine McKittrick in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
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N.K. Jemisin describes "Element X" as the core creative device that powers speculative worlds. “This premise binds the narrative together, defining what is possible in a story and shaping what can (and does) happen.” — N.K. Jemisin, Teaches Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing, Master Class
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