meet your tour guide
Talibah Atiya
Talibah Atiya-Najee Aquil has a rich and varied background using the arts as a vehicle for social change. She graduated from Howard University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theatre and earned her Masters in Conflict Transformation at The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Whether through performing, community organizing, or teaching & facilitating, Talibah cultivates spaces for trauma healing and transforming conflicts that exist both within self and within communities. Talibah’s work is rooted in the transforming power of Radical Imagination and presented her Masters practicum as an arts-based independent research project “Ghana, Remember Me,” which uses poetry, dance and music to speak to healing historical trauma within the African Diaspora community.
Talibah Atiya has lived on the Continent of Africa: Zimbabwe, South Africa, Rwanda and Ghana since 2010 and has been leading tours to GHANA since 2021.
Talibah is currently a lecturer at The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding & a Peace and Justice Coordinator at MCC.
“Ghana, Remember Me”
For her final practicum as a graduate student from “The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding” (CJP), Talibah created an arts-based independent research project that was centered around exploring healthy and holistic approaches to reimagining the “Identity Formation” of African Americans and people of the diaspora who are descendents of slavery. Through an ethnographic experience, She journeyed to Ghana in 2018 for the ‘Year Of Return” and documented the lived experiences of people of the diaspora who decided to move to Ghana, and how that transition and connection to their history and land shaped how they see themselves. Additionally, she documented her personal journey of self discovery and healing around being a woman of color in America with ancestral roots in Ghana. Through the lens of poetry, music, dance and video, she used the findings from her research to create a performance art piece called “Ghana, Remember Me.”