Digital Culture Fellowship
Can our relationship to digital media support our collective healing and transformation?
Food Culture Collective runs a 6-month paid Digital Culture Fellowship diving into this question, exploring how to reimagine, curate, facilitate, and shape our digital spaces to nourish our communities and feed a food culture rooted in care.
Each term’s Digital Culture Fellow acts as a digital-curator-meets-thought-leader-meets-artist-in-residence on Food Culture Collective’s digital channels.
Designed for people who are hungry to ask big questions and explore their creative vision, the fellowship gives creatives an opportunity to play with, and subvert the expectations of social and digital media spaces.
The Fellowship Experience
SPRING/SUMMER 2023
Meet the Digital Culture Fellow
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Ugo is a storyteller, food justice and public health advocate, and intimate land steward. She's passionate about co-creating cultural practices that foster healthier and more resilient spaces of belonging with the land in ways that feed our spirits and inspire us to reimagine life beyond carcerality. For Ugo, healing our Mother Earth, our sacred home, and our connection to it is the key to cultivating collective liberation, transformative justice, and a society centered on reciprocity, freedom, and love for all.
Growing up as a child of Nigerian immigrants, Ugo felt a deep desire to nurture the connections tying her to her life in the US and her ancestors in Igboland. She draws inspiration from the cultural legacies of land-based practices, dream-weaving, and storytelling, and believes that reweaving societies that honor these practices is essential for reigniting the collective fire within the African Diaspora.
Currently, as the Digital Food Culture Fellow, Ugo is exploring her foodways and the ways in which systems of oppression and domination have shaped the ways Black people engage with food culture in the US and across the Diaspora. Through tending to the land, discovering the practices of her ancestral lineage, and finding inspiration in the stories and legacies of Black land predecessors and successors, Ugo is working to bridge the gaps embedded in the larger consciousness of how we not only tell stories about our connection to this planet, but also around our relationships with each other and what they could be.
To stay grounded in her practice, Ugo enjoys hiking, getting her hands in the dirt, and tending to her plants. She also finds solace in music and dance, which are lifelines she calls upon to navigate life's challenges. If you're looking for her, you might catch her at her favorite artists' concerts and festivals throughout the Bay Area this year.