“The text is inscribed in our bodies and on the land and we must trust the body’s own knowing to activate the memory in our bones.”
Nana Kumi is a southern ghanaian-american storyteller, queer multimedia artist, spiritual herbalist, and world weaver from Natchez, Mississippi. Her visual work translates the language of plants, visions, and dreams into naturalist and afro-surrealist landscapes as activation sites for re-remembering. Nana completes her work through several mediums: analog photography, film, collective narrative, and installation to weave Black American South traditions and West African spiritual lineages to root containers for rest, liberatory co-dreaming, and radical imagination.
She is the founder of Gholden Alchemy, a creative studio devoted to storytelling, ritual, plant medicine, and land-based praxis as tools for healing and liberation. Through Gholden Alchemy, Nana cultivates immersive spaces for Black memory work, sacred dreaming, and reimagining freedom.
She proudly uplifts Mississippi as the fertile lands that shaped her along with her ancestry from Ghana, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Brazil, and Angola — lineages that inform both her creative and spiritual path.
A devoted student and practitioner of community and spiritual herbalism, Nana has studied under Dr. Jaqui Wilkins NP of Xalish Medicines, Adriana Ayales of Anima Mundi, and is a Level II graduate of Empress Karen Rose's Spiritual Herbalism Apprenticeship.
She is also the project director of The Spirit in Our Roots, an art-based land initiative addressing food sovereignty and racial justice in rural Mississippi and Louisiana. Through storytelling, portraiture, poetry, and ancestral recipe-making, the project documents the lived experiences of black growers, land stewards, and agrarians — amplifying their wisdom and generational resilience.
NanaKumi.ART is a living archive and altar that reflects the threads of rich and layered work that I hold along with my Ancestors, the land, community, and creative co-conspirators.