Join us at ICP as educator Ericka Hart leads a conversation on how the intersection of photography and reproductive justice operates in our everyday lives. Hart will be joined by Sevonna Brown, Shawnee Benton Gibson, and Naima Green, whose exhibition, Instead, I spin fantasies, is on view at ICP through January 12.
This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online. Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $5 and include access to ICP’s galleries.
About the Speakers
Ericka Hart (pronouns: she/they) is a black queer femme activist, writer, highly acclaimed speaker and award-winning sexuality educator with a Master’s of Education in Human Sexuality from Widener University. Ericka’s work broke ground when she went topless showing her double mastectomy scars in public in 2016. Since then, she has been in demand at colleges and universities across the country, featured in countless digital and print publications like Vogue, Washington Post, Allure, Harper’s Bazaar, VICE, PAPER Mag, BBC News, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, W Magazine, Glamour, Elle, and Essence. Ericka’s voice is rooted in leading edge thought around human sexual expression as inextricable to overall human health and its intersections with race, gender, chronic illness and disability. Both radical and relatable, she continues to push well beyond the threshold of sex positivity. Ericka Hart has taught sexuality education for elementary aged youth to adults across New York City for over 10 years, including for 4 years at Columbia University’s School of Social work and the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College. They are currently running their own sex ed training program called Sex Ed as Resistance, a bratty switchy Sagittarius service bottom and misses Whitney more than you.
Sevonna Brown is a dynamic force in maternal and child health, renowned for a career devoted to ending preventable maternal mortality and morbidity. As the Founder and CEO of Sanctuary for Integrative Medicine, she creates transformative, culturally responsive programs that support mothers, families, and communities through holistic, evidence-based care. A Principal Investigator for the NIH, Sevonna leads groundbreaking research aimed at eliminating disparities in maternal and infant outcomes, translating science into actionable strategies that save lives. Her work spans the globe, from cities in the U.S. to communities across Africa, where she collaborates with local leaders to implement programs that empower families and strengthen reproductive justice and health systems. Sevonna has partnered with organizations including Merck for Mothers, Aetna, CVS, and UN initiatives, and her advocacy has been featured in documentaries like The Business of Birth Control and Aftershock. She has authored influential pieces in TIME Magazine, Ebony, and Rewire News, bringing attention to systemic inequities and innovative solutions in reproductive health. A Gates Millennium Scholar and NGen 2023 Fellow, Sevonna’s work is both visionary and actionable. She has served hundreds of families and trained countless health professionals to deliver culturally informed care. Her mission: to dismantle medical injustice, champion maternal and child health, and cultivate a world where every mother and infant can thrive. For more about Sevonna and her work, visit Sanctuary for Integrative Medicine.
Shawnee Benton Gibson, LMSW / FLDC is the CEO of Spirit of A Woman (S.O.W.) Leadership Development Institute and the Co-Founder of the ARIAH Foundation. She has over 34 years of administrative, clinical and executive coaching experience and expertise in women’s leadership, youth development, reproductive justice, racial equity, individual, couples, family and group counseling, trauma and bereavement. These skills, combined with her spiritual and artistic gifts, allow Shawnee to guide individuals as they navigate the various stages and phases of their lives. Shawnee employs a holistic, cultural and spiritual approach to her work and utilizes a social justice lens as a foundational principle for her service to community. Her primary healing tools consist of spiritual counseling, vision coaching, psychodrama, sociometry, sacred rituals, energy work, the performing arts and storytelling as mediums to ignite transformation and initiate catharsis. Shawnee is the subject of the Emmy nominated documentary “Aftershock”. The film follows her and her family as they fight for reproductive justice in the wake of the tragic and preventable death of Shawnee’s eldest daughter, Shamony Makeba Gibson, due to a birth related pulmonary embolism. According to Shawnee, “activism is a labor of love and liberation"
Naima Green is an artist and educator who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. She engages with various photographic forms, sound, and experimental film. Throughout her collaborative practice, Green accesses and prioritizes the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. Often working in lush and watery environments, she presents windows into multidimensional experiences of seawater and its pathways: beauty, buoyancy, overwhelm, and submersion. Oral and written histories are critical to her process; by synthesizing archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames picture-making as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.
Naima Green, humming with promise, 2024 © Naima Green