Sangodare Bio(s)

Long Bio

Ṣangodare (also known as Sangodare Julia Wallace) is a sweet space for transformation. Ṣangodare activates Black Feminist sermonics coming from a thick legacy of Black Baptist preachers, gospel musicians and congregational singing. She creates media and art intended to support us to heal and transform and also facilitates safe spaces for transformation and self-initiation. Sangodare is a filmmaker, multimedia collaborator/consultant/strategist, musician, composer, theologian and facilitator. As co-founder of Mobile Homecoming, a national experiential archive project created with Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ṣangodare amplifies generations of Black LGBTQ brilliance by every generative means including using multimedia and technology, building businesses and intergenerational family of choice across time and space.

Ṣangodare is a retreat organizer, filmmaker, composer and entrepreneur. Ṣangodare's 2018 art exhibition, Inherit Light: An Evolutionary Practice of Love Consciousness, was a multisensory experience with Black southern preaching and singing legacies, sound, altars, sculptures, film and elements of the natural world. It also features small and large-scale ruminations on round sculpture and buildings - domes. The dome in Inherit Light is the multi-sensory and interactive sacred space where Ṣangodare's invocations and sermons are ignited through the site-specific activations. In 2020 Ṣangodare and Alexis were the inaugural celebrants in residence for Northstar Church of the Arts (Durham, NC) Sunday Services. Ṣangodare was named a Southern Healing Star awardee by BEAM & Lipton in 2020/21 (BEAM - Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective). Sangodare is the founder and CEO of a tech company called QUIRC which connects communities worldwide for mission-driven projects.

As co-founder of Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library & Archive (an outgrowth of Mobile Homecoming) which exists to sustain the lives and legacies of Black feminist and Mobile Homecoming elders, their legacy bearers and caregivers, Sangodare gathers, stewards and circulates resources.

As co-founder of Black Feminist Film School, for more than 10yrs Ṣangodare has brought a black feminist approach to mediamaking and creative practice. Ṣangodare has been honored and featured in national press including being named one of Colorlines 10 LGBTQ Leaders building a new politics in 2012, in The Advocate magazines Top 40 under 40 and named a Southern Healing Star awardee by BEAM and Lipton in 2020/2021 (BEAM - Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective). Ṣangodare’s writing appears in a number of books and journals including Lambda literary Award nominated Mouths of Rain - Anew,  No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies - Something Else To Be : Generations Of  Black Queer Brilliance And The Mobile Homecoming Experiential Archive, Are the Women Still All White - Black Feminist Calculus Meets Nothing to Prove: A Mobile Homecoming Project Ritual Towards the  PostDigital and the journal Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora to name a sampling. 

Ṣangodare earned an undergraduate degree in Multimedia Computer Science from UNC Asheville, a Masters in Divinity from Emory University's Candler School of Theology and has completed three years of coursework toward a Masters in Film Production at Georgia State University culminating in a MFA degree in Film and Media from Black Feminist Film School.

Sangodare is a Priest of Ṣango (Ifa-Orisha tradition) celebrating the throughline from the West African spiritual and cultural practices to the Black church traditions of the so called Americas including their own Carolina Black Baptist traditions.
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OTHER NOTABLE INFO
Sangodare’s primary collaborator is Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Together they have co-created Mobile Homecoming, a national intergenerational experiential archive project that amplifies generations of Black LGBTQ brilliance by every means including using multimedia and building intergenerational family of choice across time and space. The Mobile Homecoming feature film is in post-production and has released shorts while in process including No Legacy Let Go which has toured with the show Queer Rebels of the Harlem Renaissance 2012-2013.

Black Feminist Film School, a collaboration between Alexis’s organization Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind and Queer Renaissance, engages and amplifies films that are (or may be) Black feminist and grows filmmaking skills among those who are historically under-represented in filmmaking. bffs has been hosted by Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, The Sallie Bingham Archive at Duke University and Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. One of our film projects, written, directed and edited by Sangodare, was a short film called When We Free created in collaboration with our national community and black feminist film school fellows. It imagines the first camp meeting (revival) a community of black folks in the Carolinas have after emancipation. To share When We Free, Sangodare created the Ritual Screening technology that activates the screening as an interactive community ritual space for participatory engagement with the audience, the non-linear and other interactive elements present in the space.

Sangodare and Alexis have also hosted more than 10 multi-day retreats in the Southern U.S. and Caribbean including the sampling listed below:

• Queer Black August at The Stone House (Mebane, NC),

• Combahee Pilgrimage at The Penn Center (St. Helena Island, SC),

• Rest and Realness (Georgia)

• Combahee Survival Revival Week (Durham, NC),

• Black Feminist Film School Summer Intensive (Durham, NC) and

• When We Free Production at the Stone House (Mebane, NC),

• Dark Sciences: POC Dream Retreat at Alma de Mujer in Austin, TX.

They have also facilitated workshops, daylong retreats, multi-day retreats and Black Feminist pilgrimages, residencies and coordinated tracks and institutes at over 50 universities, conferences and in communities across the country including USC, San Francisco State, Ramapo College, Vanderbilt, Creating Change/The National Gay Lesbian Task Force, Colgate University, University of Texas at Austin, Black Lesbians United (BLU), allgo, University of Florida, Smith, Barnard, Columbia, Rutgers, Allied Media Conference, Atlanta’s Black Gay Pride, Hotter Than July/Detroit Black Gay Pride, Sexuality in the Lesbian Community (Brooklyn, NY), Lawrence University, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Howard University Law School to name a sampling.

Sangodare and Alexis offer workshops by request but mostly based on needs they see within community. For example, some of Sangodare’s workshops include Ancestral Reverence as Character Development: A Re/Introduction to Story Development and Scriptwriting. This and other workshops draw from media literacy training and teaching that Sangodare facilitated as a theology student at Emory University, as a graduate communications student at GSU, as an independent multimedia consultant and artist working with institutional and grassroots organizations such as Digital Arts Entertainment Laboratory - DAEL (Atlanta, GA), Kindred Healing Justice Organization (Atlanta, GA), Allied Media Projects (Detroit, MI), and Tierra Negra Farms (Durham, NC). Sangodare also collaborates with artists and healers in a discernment process they created called Spiritual Portrait. The Spiritual Portrait process connects an individuals deepest calling and purpose to actionable strategies for implementation that take into account energetic and ego blocks that recur in the individuals life. This process combines all the tools and techniques that Sangodare has studied including but not limited to:

• enneagram,

• archetype,

• Ifa-Orisha,

• chakra systems and tree of life

• outreach (aka marketing) and niche marketing,

• emergent strategy,

• Hypnojourney,

• personal organization (aka GTD - Getting Things Done)

• multimedia technology

• Tai Chi,

• Qi Gong and more.

Sangodare composes and produces music in multiple forms (including West African derived music, Gospel, Hip Hop, Blues, Jazz and more). Sangodare created Transcend, a sermonic music performance, with support and direction from Toshi Reagon*. It is performed by a network of local musicians and choir members. Transcend is a congregational journey that invites us to consider the imperatives Light, Pray, and Grow. It draws on Black Church traditions from the Carolinas, Soul/R&B music, Black feminist legacies, and sacred texts, as well as African diasporic wisdom traditions. Sangodare produced the audio piece for Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s poem To You Who Understand (My People) which toured internationally with Makeshift Reclamations: New Feminist Art and Activism a multimedia showcase.

Sangodare received an undergraduate degree in Multimedia Computer Science from UNC Asheville, a Masters in Divinity from Emory University's Candler School of Theology and has completed three years of coursework toward a Masters in Film Production at Georgia State University culminating in a MFA degree in Film and Media from Black Feminist Film School. As a former member of the leadership council of Ile Ori Ogbe Egun, an African centered national spiritual community that bridges the gap between African and African American traditions, Sangodare focused on self-development, pedagogy, strategic planning, logistics and cultural practices.

Sangodare has written and directed short narrative films and experimental films, feature length documentaries (for ritual screening), a short documentary piece on award winning artist Lillian Blades and has also documented many LGBTQ community events. Sangodare debuted a collection of work at the event called The Ties that Bind in Atlanta, GA in 2009 and continues to write, score, direct and produce independent films that prioritize healing poetics; and continues filmmaking AND film screening as spiritual practice, ceremony and ritual.

*Creative Futures Artist-in-Residence Toshi Reagon has made a career out of collaboration. In recent years, she’s been embedded in North Carolina, where she’s worked with countless local artists to build a space where creativity and community collide.

As CPA’s (UNC Center for Performing Arts) longest-running artist-in-residence, Toshi has been a steady, centering force. She continued that work with Meet You at the Crossroads IV, a curated three-day gathering with artist practitioners and soulful creatives including Sangodare’s presentation of Transcend.

As I said above, Transcend is a sermonic music performance, with support and direction from Toshi. It was performed as a part of Meet You at the Crossroads IV by a network of local musicians and choir members, an emergent collective that Sangodare calls The Congregation. Transcend is a congregational journey that invites us to consider the imperatives Light, Pray, and Grow. It draws on Black Church traditions from the Carolinas, Soul/R&B music, Black feminist legacies, and sacred texts, as well as African diasporic wisdom traditions.

Quotes & Excerpts

FilmMaking as spiritual practice

"It is impossible for me to ignore the many levels on which media, or anything that can be perceived for that matter, has an impact on us. I do everything I do as an expression of who I really am spirit-mind-body. So, for me, filmmaking and even walking is a spiritual practice. What is unique about bffs is that we acknowledge that and create the space for practitioners (novice or so-called expert) to be immersed in this non-linear approach to filmmaking."
~Sangodare

Visit When We Free online to learn more about the film.

Sound Design

"I am a composer. My partner gets on me for saying that I am not a musician but it is true, for the most part. I may be a vocalist but when it comes to instruments I play what I hear and what I feel in the moment. I have not maintained a consistent instrument practice since choir as an elementary school aged child and band in middle school. I say this as someone who was the pianist and minister of music at a church. Extemporaneous expression or musicianship is not to be denigrated though. There is just a different kind of practice that gives one the ability to do it."
~Sangodare

COMPOSING

"I began directing choirs out of necessity. As a young child the choir directors were usually young women. Growing up as I got older my cousins, usually male cousins, directed the choirs but I sometimes played the piano in rehearsal while they taught the songs. This training was invaluable. It wasn't until I was an adult and part of a church that needed a choir director and pianist that I became minister of music and took on the role I had been training for since childhood. In this role, I taught and composed traditional and contemporary gospel.

What I do now is a whole 'nother ball game. It grew out of a deep desire to have the congregational songs and meter hymns I grew up with present and alive inside my new communities that did not have the Carolina Black baptist tradition. So, I developed a collective composing process that grew out of a sound circle foundation. Where we are headed feels like an emergent kind of space; creating the melodies and resonances for a multi-everything community of choice which is not based on many shared cultural or spiritual practices beyond love and justice."