Open Studio
A monthly practice ground for Black feminist worldbuilders who don’t want to build alone.
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IMAGE: R.S.V.P. activated by Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger at Pearl C. Woods Gallery, Los Angeles, May 1977, Photo: Harmon Outlaw. Source: "Embodied Reciprocity"
Learn More About Open Studio
Whether you are currently inside the Seed A World Retreat, a retreat alum or completely new to Seeda School, Open Studio is where you come to be witnessed inside your desire.
That desire could be to seed a book, a school, a cooperative, a community garden, an apothecary, a zine, a song, an offer.
We hold it all as sacred.
2
MONTHLY SESSIONS
1
GLOBAL COMMUNITY OF WORLDBUILDERS
$67
MONTHLY INVESTMENT
This is not the crit container from art school.
This isn't a place where folks with no idea about your lived experience are given permission to critique your work in progress.
This is not a critique container,
This is a studio.
Inside Open Studio, your ideas get held while they are incubating.
Your work gets witnessed while in progress.
Your intuition is affirmed and your doubt is acknowledged.
Inside Open Studio, your desire is held with the same reverence as your fear.
Inside Open Studio, we understand both are two sides of a single coin and both are our greatest teachers.
This is not another program.
Open Studio is not another mandatory class, work obligation or line item on the to do list.
No prep is required, only your presence.
There will be no homework, but there will be plenty of invitations.
We gather twice a month to ask questions, welcome feedback and learn from our peers practicing in public.
We explore themes such as pricing and offer development, erotically engineering our time and capacity, translating our skills and stories into sacred sales systems and so much more.
Open Studio is where you bring your work, without leaving yourself behind.
“What if it is not an experiment, this creative life of refusal. This rarely institutionally-funded disloyal life of practice for a world as yet unnamable. This insistence on transformation when the bank account screams “conform.” What if this life as an independent experimental artist is not itself an independent experiment? What if it’s an interdependent ceremony?"
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “The God of Every Day” published by Topical Cream on December 22nd, 2021
Open Studio Is For You If…
You’re currently inside the Seed A World Retreat and want a collective container for real-time integration and feedback inside your offer development work.
You're a Seed A World Retreat Alum and your favorite part about the live retreat experience were the Open Studio sessions.
You’re completely new to Seeda School and want real-time feedback on a worldbuilding project already in progress, without signing up for another program.
You’ve taken the courses, you've read the books, you've done the research and you know this your season for integration and action. You've gathered your resources and your tools, now it's time to use them.
You're ready to escape loops of perfectionism, over-preparation and self-doubt. You are ready to allow your work to be held and witnessed before becoming public.
You are craving a community to hold you accountable to your highest values when it comes to your labor and your money.
Your practice is deeply interdisciplinary so of course your offer is too. Open Studio is for you if you want a community that is going to celebrate the emergence blooming from your interdisciplinary ecosystem instead of flatten it out of intimidation and fear.
You want to witness other worldbuilders working while you remember your desire, reclaim your power and step into the audacious creative visions for your own life. You want to expand your own self-permission to access a creative life of refusal.
Open Studio may not be for you if...
You are desiring new worldbuilding curriculum each month.
Enroll into the Seed A World Retreat for 9-weeks of Black feminist curriculum rooted in offer development and creative actualization.
Unfortunately, majority of art schools teach creative practice without teaching sales skills.
Seeda School may not be a good fit if you're uninterested in monetizing your creative labor and cultural work.
What Happens Inside Open Studio
We meet twice a month, that's our rhythm.
Show → Tell → Ask, that's our framework.
Show.
Bring what you’re working on — an offer, an idea, a draft, a question.
Tell.
Share where you’re stuck, curious, unsure or excited.
Ask.
Name the kind of feedback or support you want and the feedback you're not looking for.
This is a collectively held container.
A monthly call and response ceremony.
I will offer live Black feminist business coaching, reflection, clarifying questions and strategic guidance to support you in your offer development process. Your peers will also be invited to offer resonance, insight and witnessing.
Why Open Studio pairs so well with the Seed A World Retreat
Seed A World gives you structure.
Open Studio gives you support.
Seed A World helps you:
- Clarify your desire and your values
- Develop your income-generating offer in alignment with your desire and your values
- Create and launch a sacred sales system in alignment with your desire and your values
Open Studio helps you:
- Practice telling your story, pitching your offer and naming your price with grounded power
- Move through resistance and get feedback before doubt spirals, isolation feels safer and functional freeze takes hold
- Gently navigate shifts and pivots in your energy, capacity, health and abilities without shrinking into shame or negative self-talk
WHERE THEORY MEETS PRACTICE
Seed A World is for learning Black feminist worldbuilding.
Open Studio is for practicing Black feminist worldbuilding.
A few things your might be wondering...
When do we meet?
Do I have to come every time?
What if I don’t have anything to share?
What if I’m behind?
Do I belong here?
Is Seeda School open to non-Black worldbuilders?
"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.
As a participant 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.
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
Solidarity Pricing
Solidarity pricing tiers and descriptions are borrowed from Black feminist worldbuilder and Seeda School Alum nènè myriam konaté. If you're interested in Seeda School you might also be interested in their offering, The Clap Back Manifest(o).
Join at anytime. Cancel at anytime.
WE ONLY WISH TO PRACTICE WITH YOU AS LONG AS IT FEELS DESIRABLE, EASEFUL, ACCESSIBLE AND ALIGNED.
Meet Your Open Studio Facilitator
I’m Ayana Zaire Cotton (she/they), a Black feminist worldbuilder, writer, erotic engineer and business architect devoted to helping Black feminist artists, academics and founders build lives and livelihoods rooted in desire. My work lives at the intersection of spell and strategy, poetry and plumbing, erotic truth and structural rigor. I don’t teach pedagogy I haven’t practiced. I teach from embodiment — from the imagination transformations, initiations and experiments that made my work sustainable, resourced and sovereign.
Through Seeda School, I support worldbuilders who are done waiting on institutions, gatekeepers or permission slips from the old world. Together, we treat creative practice as non-negotiable ceremony and business-building as a liberatory bridge. I help worldbuilders clarify their offers, develop values-aligned sales systems and build recurring revenue that funds their writing, research and worldmaking without sacrificing integrity, pleasure or political clarity.
For over a decade, I’ve launched art projects, social sculptures and speculative frameworks that doubled as businesses and books — learning how to circulate resources while staying rooted in desire. If you’re ready to stop outsourcing your power, step into self-agency and let your work be resourced by the people it’s for, this is an invitation to say "yes" to your offer and the world it makes possible.
Photograph by Stephen Miller. Custom workwear created by Ayana Zaire Cotton from her previous business, Zaire Studio.
Website
"It’s been so incredibly powerful to see the way each prompt, each assignment, each framework, in such a short amount of time, brings the threads of my practice into harmony and makes it so the universe can clearly respond. I can’t even count the number epiphanies I’ve had since I’ve started working with you. Thank you."
Ravon Ruffin, Founder of Citation Studio
About Seeda School
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 creative actualization.
Our mission is to make revolution irresistible1 through the framework of Black feminist worldbuilding.
Our vision is a generation of present, paid, powerhouses building infrastructures of mutual aid supported by Black feminist offers and businesses.
SEED DATA
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“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 (2012), edited by Thabiti Lewis
You don’t need another program.
YOU MIGHT JUST NEED A PLACE TO PRACTICE.
Maybe you recently picked up a few Black feminist books and are eager to seed a practice.
Maybe you're decades into a Black feminist practice and want to widen and deepen your view with other Black feminist peers in practice beyond your institution or organization.
Maybe you're a Seeda School Alum who has been away from their worldbuilding practice and is seeking a gently held return.
Whether you're seeding, deepening or returning to a Black feminist worldbuilding practice, Open Studio exists to meet you where you are.
What to expect after you enroll...
1
Join
Enroll into Open Studio today and receive your onboarding email acclimating you inside Seeda School.
You'll also be invited to join us in the upcoming Open Studio session, happening every 2nd and 4th Thursday.
2
Receive
"Show, Tell, Ask" inside the Open Studio session in order to receive feedback, accountability or suggested resources.
Practice asking for what you need and receiving it.
3
Build
Join monthly to listen, share and receive.
Allow yourself to be witnessed and supported as you build your practice, your offer, your business — a world rooted in desire.
If this feels right on time...
I want to invite you to join us.
“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.”
— Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power" (1978)
What Worldbuilders Are Saying About Seeda School
"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."
— Jasmyne Gilbert
"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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Today, just two weeks after the Retreat's end, I started softly launching my program. I may not have been here without the Retreat!
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
“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.
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.
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.
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
“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
"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.”
Chinyere Erondu, Fall 2023
“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
“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.”
Taylor Rae, Fall 2023
“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.”
— 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."
— 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
“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.”
— 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.”
— Vanessa Murchie, Fall 2023
"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.”
— 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.”
— Dkéama Alexis, Fall 2023
