About me
Bayo Akomolafe is the grateful life partner to ‘EJ’, father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, son of Olufunmilayo Ibidapo Akomolafe and Ignatius Abayomi Akomolafe, and descendant of Yoruba fields of archetypal becomings and mythopoeic landscapes. He is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept imagined together with and inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer trickster), whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power, and queering fond formulations and configurations of hope. In 2014, Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He left his lecturing position at Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance. Bayo has been a Visiting Professor at Middlebury College and has taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Guest Scholar Information Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and the University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality, Unashay Sanctuary, and more. As Visionary Founder and Elder of The Emergence Network and Chief Host of the widely popular online-offline course/festival series, We Will Dance with Mountains, Bayo curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a material feminist/posthumanist/post activist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies. He considers this a shared art – exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival of radical silence on the street in London – and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community. Bayo Akomolafe is a recipient of the 2021 New Thought Walden Award, which is meant to honour those who use empowering spiritual ideas and philosophies to change lives and make our planet a better place.
