Our art praxis and “An Uprising of Dreams” are calling us to move far beyond mainstream concepts of wellness. It asks us to study the ways in which our divinity, higher purpose, and ability to resist violent and oppressive systems are intertwined with how we access our rest, imagination, and DreamSpace. Tricia’s work is a pathway to the rest practices needed to collectively build and imagine new worlds as we simultaneously dismantle and deprogram ourselves from the systems that prop up and perpetuate the racial, social, and environmental harm done by white supremacy and extractive capitalism. This work was created collaboratively as our healing and liberation will not happen alone. Our collective rest and commitment to community care will save us.

The Nap Ministry
Founded by artist and theologian Tricia Hersey in 2016, The Nap Ministry are the originators of the ‘rest as resistance’ and ‘rest as reparations.’ We engage with the power of performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing to install sacred spaces for the community to rest together. We facilitate immersive workshops, and curate performance art that examines rest as a radical tool for community healing.  We believe rest is a form of resistance and name sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue. Our work is seeded within the soils of Black radical thought, somatics, Afrofuturism, womanism, and liberation theology, and is a guide for how to collectively deprogram, decolonize, and unravel ourselves from the wreckage of capitalism and white supremacy. We believe our bodies are portals. They are sites of liberation, knowledge, and invention that are waiting to be reclaimed and awakened by the beautiful interruptions of brutal systems that sleep and dreaming provide.

Tricia Hersey
Tricia Hersey is a multidisciplinary artist, activist, writer and theologian. She is the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization that examines rest as a form of resistance and reparations by curating spaces for the community to rest via rest activations, immersive workshops, and performance art installations.  She holds a Bachelor of Science in Public Health from Eastern Illinois University and a Master of Divinity from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Her research interests include Black liberation theology, womanism, somatics, and cultural trauma.  She is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto and The Nap Ministry’s Rest Deck: 50 Practices to Resist Grind Culture.  You can learn more about her work at thenapministry.com

Aïsha Trambas
Aïsha Trambas (she/her) is an afro-greek poet, facilitator and arts worker. Aïsha is currently Creative Producer at Western Edge Youth Arts, and has worked across programming, production and performing with SIGNAL youth arts studio, the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, Emerging Writers’ Festival, YIRRAMBOI, Footscray Community Arts, Next in Colour, and more. In 2022, Aisha’s poetry was published by Freemantle and Djed Press in Unlimited Futures, an anthology of Bla(c)k speculative fiction.

Author / Lead Artist: Tricia Hersey
Host: Aisha Trambas