The source
collection.

BasSheva

Mañjon, PhD

Consulting for Meaningful Change

Artist • Cultural Anthropologist • Scholar of Transformative Learning • Systems Weaver

My Philosophy

I believe knowledge is carried in story as much as in scholarship; in the body as much as in the intellect; in relationship as much as in institutions. Art, ritual, research, leadership, and healing are not separate disciplines. They are interconnected practices through which we remember our humanity and imagine more life-giving futures.

Every Branch Begins with a Root

About me

My work is rooted in a lifelong exploration of how people create meaning, sustain community, remember who they are, and imagine new ways of living together.

I came to this work through the arts before I came to it through academia. I participated in theatre and dance before I started secondary schooling. It was a necessary grounding in culture, tradition, and lineage.

My undergraduate studies in World Arts and Cultures immersed me further in theatre, dance, visual art, folklore, mythology, ritual, and performance as ways of knowing. I learned that culture is not simply inherited. It is continually created through story, movement, creativity, relationship, and collective memory.That understanding deepened through graduate study in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation, where I explored how communities respond to displacement, inequality, resilience, and social change. Anthropology taught me to listen deeply. Social transformation taught me that meaningful change does not begin with fixing people, but with transforming relationships, systems, and the stories we tell about ourselves.My doctoral work expanded these questions into the study of transformative learning and change in human systems. Drawing upon organic inquiry, participatory research, and collaborative learning communities, my research explored how personal transformation, collective wisdom, and embodied knowing emerge when people gather with curiosity, vulnerability, and imagination.Throughout this journey, I have been drawn to the voices that have too often been relegated to the margins, particularly the stories, poetry, lived experiences, and creative expressions of women. I have long understood story not simply as narrative, but as methodology, as knowledge, and as a vessel through which memory, identity, healing, and possibility are carried across generations. These intellectual traditions continue to shape everything I create.Whether working alongside educational institutions, artists, nonprofit organizations, foundations, or communities, I approach every partnership with the understanding that organizations are living cultures, leadership is a relational practice, and transformation emerges through participation rather than prescription.Today, my work lives at the intersection of cultural anthropology and transformative learning, participatory inquiry and artistic practice, living systems embedded in ancestral wisdom, and sacred feminine traditions. These are not separate disciplines for me. They are interconnected ways of listening, remembering, creating, and transforming.These practices now find expression through research, public scholarship, immersive art, organizational ecology, community convenings, and the emerging vision of the Diasporic Women's Commons.These are not separate endeavors. They are different expressions of the same question:How do living systems remember how to flourish?

What happens when people become separated from the stories that tell them who they are?

There is a question that has guided my life for as long as I can remember:

My work is an ongoing exploration of that question, explored through:

art/music/dance/theatre as living systems

sacred feminine practice and ancestral wisdom

organic and participatory inquiry

cultural anthropology and social transformation

transformative learning and change in human systems

BasSheva Mañjon, PhD

EmailInstagramLinkedin

Designed by Alé Luya

Consulting for Meaningful Change

Build your vision. Strengthen your organization. Put your mission into practice.

I partner with colleges, foundations, arts organizations, and community leaders to turn ambitious ideas into practical plans, sustainable programs, and collaborative approaches to work.

As an artist, scholar, and executive leader with more than 25 years of experience, I bring strategic thinking, creative inquiry, and a deep commitment to equity. My approach centers the people doing the work and the communities they serve.

Building possibility together

·

Building possibility together · Building possibility together ·

How I Can Help

Academic Program Development & Accreditation:

Review curriculum, assess programs, and prepare for accreditation and student success.

Arts, Culture & Creative Research:

Connect diaspora, intergenerational knowledge, cultural memory, and socially engaged art.

Community Engagement & Partnerships:

Build reciprocal partnerships around shared priorities and lasting benefit.

Foundation & Nonprofit Capacity Building:

Strengthen governance, staffing, development strategy, grant management, and organizational systems.

Leadership, Governance & Succession Planning:

Facilitate retreats, clarify roles, and strengthen collaborative leadership and succession plans.

Strategic Planning & Organizational Development:

Align mission, staffing, resources, and decision-making.

Selected Clients & Collaborations

SHERA FOUNDATION

ART COUNCIL OF SANTA CLARA COUNTY

Launching a program, preparing for accreditation, or navigating organizational change?

I offer focused projects, ongoing strategic advising, retreats, and workshops to help you move forward.

Let’s build

together.

BasSheva Mañjon, PhD

EmailInstagramLinkedin

Designed by Alé Luya

Story is not simply something we tell. It’s a way of knowing.

Art & Ancestral Memory:

Art is one of the oldest ways human beings remember.

Through installation, storytelling, photography, ritual, and participatory practice, I explore ancestry, migration, identity, memory, and the invisible threads that connect generations. My artistic work invites viewers not simply to observe, but to enter into a relationship with their own histories and imagine new possibilities for collective healing.

The Legacy of Bowls and Branches

(2026)

The Legacy of Bowls and Branches is an installation exploring matrilineal memory, ancestral continuity, and the living transmission of identity. Ancestry is not treated as past tense; the dead remain in conversation with the living, and lineage unfolds as an active exchange of memory, migration, survival, and becoming. The installation functions as a multi-dimensional map of continuity, tracing a continuum of 178 years (1847-2025), 40 family members, and eight generations—from my Great-Great-Grandmother, Catalina Blyden (born 1847 in St. Thomas, Danish West Indies, transitioned 1936 in Sanchez, Dominican Republic), to my Great-Great-Nephew, Jax Miles Burnett (born 2025 in Jacksonville, North Carolina). The bowls and leaves are handmade paper; each generation is represented by a unique color, and the branches and logs are from Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, PA.

a participatory research and artistic inquiry into the lives of women across the African diaspora. This ongoing project explore the stories, migrations, resilience, creativity, and wisdom of women whose lives illuminate the interconnected histories of Africa and its diasporas. Through oral history, collaborative research, artistic practice, and public engagement, the work creates spaces where personal narratives become collective memory and where remembrance becomes a pathway toward healing and future possibility.

Generations of Light

(2023 – Ongoing)

an exploration of the identities we inherit, conceal, perform, and reclaim. Invisible Identities examines the spaces between race, culture, gender, migration, and belonging. Inspired by my own journey growing up between cultures, this body of work asks how identity is shaped by the stories we tell, the stories we inherit, and those left untold. It invites viewers to reflect on the many visible and invisible ways we navigate the world while searching for home, community, and self. This body of work has been shown at universities, galleries, museums, and festivals in Ohio, California, and Arizona.

Invisible Identities

(2009 – 2025)

Exhibit: A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back at Urban Arts Space Columbus, OH. All other photo credits for additional photos: Photographer, BasSheva (Sonia) Manjon

Exhibit: An Idea Called Tomorrow, a collaborative contemporary art and civil rights exhibition co-hosted by the California African American Museum (CAAM) and the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, CA.

Organizations are living cultures.

Rather than viewing organizations as structures to manage, I approach them as living ecosystems shaped by relationships, stories, shared purpose, and collective imagination. Drawing upon decades of leadership in higher education, philanthropy, nonprofit organizations, and community partnerships, I accompany communities as they cultivate healthier ways of learning, leading, collaborating, and flourishing.

100 Families: Art and Social Change

⋇

Participatory Research Collectives

⋇

Think Tanks

⋇

Shared Governance and Culture Cultivation

100 Families: Art and Social Change ⋇ Participatory Research Collectives ⋇ Think Tanks ⋇ Shared Governance and Culture Cultivation 100 Families: Art and Social Change ⋇ Participatory Research Collectives ⋇ Think Tanks ⋇ Shared Governance and Culture Cultivation

The Diasporic Women's Commons

Drawing upon Indigenous and diasporic feminine wisdom traditions, artistic practice, scholarship, cooperative economics, and collective healing, the Commons seeks to cultivate spaces where women reconnect with ancestral knowledge, restore relationships disrupted by colonization and displacement, and imagine new ways of living together grounded in reciprocity, abundance, and peace.

an emerging international initiative rooted in the belief that remembrance is a pathway to liberation.

Sacred Feminine Practice:

Transformation is also personal.

My own practice continues to evolve through ongoing study in sacred feminine healing traditions, contemplative practice, and embodied approaches to transformation. I believe lifelong learning is itself a sacred practice, and I bring both humility and curiosity to this unfolding work.

This personal journey informs how I gather with others, creating spaces that honor reflection, intuition, creativity, relationship, and the wisdom carried within the body.

Selected Publicationsand Exhibits

Selected Artistic, Research, and Scholarly Practice

The Legacy of Bowls and Branches (2026). A multidisciplinary installation tracing eight generations of matrilineal lineage through handmade cotton-linter paper, branches, family photographs, genealogy, and oral history. The work investigates memory, migration, ancestry, and the transmission of cultural knowledge through material practice.Women Who Carry the Light: A Forty-Year Inquiry (1986–2026). A multi-decade artistic and ethnographic inquiry examining Afro-Dominican matrilineal knowledge, migration, identity, and cultural memory through visual art, oral history, genealogy, documentary practice, and community engagement. The project explores how women carry, preserve, and transform knowledge across generations and geographies.Invisible Identity (2006; reimagined 2026). A multimedia body of work examining diasporic identity, belonging, and the politics of visibility. Revisiting the project two decades later foregrounds how understandings of race, culture, identity, and self evolve through lived experience and artistic practice.Birds of Passage (2008). Video documentary emerging from doctoral research on four generations of Dominican women in California. Through oral history and visual storytelling, the film examines migration, acculturation, cultural memory, identity, and intergenerational experience.

Current Projects

The Rymer Sisters, book manuscript. A book-length narrative weaving family oral histories, archival research, and contemporary interviews to examine matrilineal memory, migration, ancestry, and Afro-Dominican identity.Mothers’ Memoirs, oral history project. An oral history project preserving family memory, migration narratives, cultural knowledge, and intergenerational experience through a life story.Generations of Light, interdisciplinary research project. An oral history and artistic research project with six nieces and one great-niece exploring how Afro-Dominican identity, belonging, cultural inheritance, and lived experience are transmitted across generations through storytelling, while considering the futures they hope to create.The Making of The Legacy of Bowls and Branches, documentary film. A documentary chronicling the creation of The Legacy of Bowls and Branches, including its material processes, genealogical research, and matrilineal storytelling.Together, these projects form interconnected threads within a living archive of Afro-Dominican women’s histories, bringing oral history, genealogy, archival research, exhibitions, documentary film, writing, and artistic practice into relationship. Family memory becomes a dynamic form of knowledge carried, interpreted, made visible, and transformed across generations.

Selected Publications and Articles

Mañjon, S. (2022). “The Difference Is—My Lived Experience!” In gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, & Amelia M. Kraehe (Eds.), A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back. University of Arizona Press.Mañjon, S., Ndzuta, A., Greene, C., Sarkar, K., Flores, N., & Guo, W. (2016). “A Transdisciplinary Approach to Mentoring through Collaboration.” Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, 5(3), 353–367.Mañjon, S., & Guo, W. (2015). “Think Tank: A Collaborative Approach to Student Learning, Organizational Assessment, and Community-Based Arts.” Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, 4(2), 57–75.Melsop, S., Mañjon, S., & Collins, K. (2014). “3 Voices: Curating Careers as Publicly Engaged Artists, Designers, and Scholars.” Public: A Journal of Imagining America, 2(2).Mañjon, S., & Moreno Vega, M. (2012). A Snapshot: Landmarking Community Cultural Arts Organizations Nationally: The Impact of Public Policy on Community Arts Funding. National Endowment for the Arts.Mañjon, S. (2007). Crafting a Vision for Art, Equity, and Civic Engagement: Convening the Community Arts Field in Higher Education. California College of the Arts.Mañjon, S. (2004). “The Challenge of Identity: The Dominican Experience in California.” In M. Turner & M. Moreno Vega (Eds.), African Diaspora Points of Unity. Global Afro Latino and Caribbean Initiative Archive, Hunter College, CUNY.

Selected Exhibitions & Installations

The Legacy of Bowls and Branches (July 14–August 15, 2026). Installation included in The Black Madonna & Other Sacred Spaces, Urban Arts Space, Columbus, Ohio.Invisible Identity: Mujeres Dominicanas en California (forthcoming, December 8, 2026–February 16, 2027). Installation included in A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back, Joseph Gross Gallery, School of Art, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona.Aqueous Memory Archive and Exhibit (June–September 2025). Contributing Artist, Oakland, California.Invisible Identity: Mujeres Dominicanas en California (May 21–June 29, 2024). Installation included in A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back, Urban Arts Space, Columbus, Ohio.Invisible Identity: Mujeres Dominicanas en California (2014–2016). Video and photographic installation, Ohio State University Student Union and Thompson Library, Columbus, Ohio.Invisible Identity: Mujeres Dominicanas en California (2009–2010). Video and photographic installation included in An Idea Called Tomorrow, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, California.100 Families Oakland: Art & Social Change (2007). Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California.

Selected Documentary & Video Work

The Making of The Legacy of Bowls and Branches (2026–present). Documentary in progress chronicling the creation of The Legacy of Bowls and Branches, including its material processes, genealogical research, and matrilineal storytelling.100 Families Oakland: Art & Social Change (2007). Executive Producer. Thirty-minute documentary co-created with the City of Oakland government television station, KTOP.Crafting a Vision for Art, Equity, and Civic Engagement: Convening the Community Arts Field in Higher Education (2007). Editor and producer/director of supplementary DVD, California College of the Arts, Oakland, California.Birds of Passage (2004). A documentary video emerging from doctoral research examining the impact of immigration on four generations of Dominican and Dominican American women in one family, using organic inquiry.Pieces of Cloth, Pieces of Culture: Tapa Making and Community Collaboration (2004). Filmmaker/Producer, California College of the Arts.

BasSheva Mañjon, PhD

EmailInstagramLinkedin

Designed by Alé Luya

An Invitation to Shared Practice

We Remember

Creating spaces where individuals and communities reconnect with ancestral wisdom, cultural memory, embodied knowing, and collective imagination.

We Reimagine

Accompanying organizations, educational institutions, foundations, artists, and communities as they cultivate living ecosystems rooted in relationship, shared stewardship, creativity, and liberatory practice.

We Gather

Convening immersive learning experiences, dialogues, retreats, artist residencies, circles, and participatory inquiries that invite deep reflection, creative exploration, and transformative connection.

We Create

Collaborating through public scholarship, artistic practice, exhibitions, participatory research, writing, storytelling, oral history, and interdisciplinary inquiry.

We Cultivate

Nurturing long-term communities of learning, practice, and belonging through mentorship, collaborative inquiry, sacred feminine practice, and the evolving vision of the Diasporic Women's Commons.

Let's begin a conversation

If this work resonates with you or your community, I welcome the opportunity to imagine, learn, and create together.

basshevamanjon@gmail.com

This work is offered through relationship, conversation, and mutual discernment. Each engagement is shaped by the people, community, organization, or inquiry at the center of the work.

I do not approach this work as a traditional consultant; I enter as a thought partner, cultural worker, systems weaver, artist, and facilitator of collective remembering. Together, we create conditions for deeper listening, honest reflection, creative imagination, and meaningful transformation.

Because each invitation is different, pricing is developed in conversation and reflects the scope, scale, preparation, facilitation, travel, creative design, and ongoing accompaniment required.

Exchange & Investment

Initial ConversationComplimentary 30-minute conversation to explore alignment, needs, and possibilities.

Reflection & Wayfinding SessionFor individuals, artists, leaders, or small teams seeking clarity around a transition, project, question, or emerging body of work.

Shared Practice GatheringA custom-designed circle, dialogue, workshop, or facilitated experience for teams, communities, or organizations.

Immersive Retreat or Learning ExperienceA half-day, full-day, or multi-day gathering designed around reflection, transformation, creativity, culture, leadership, healing, or collective visioning.

Organizational Ecology PartnershipLonger-term accompaniment for organizations, institutions, foundations, or collectives navigating transition, culture change, shared governance, strategic imagination, or community-rooted transformation.

Speaking, Public Scholarship & Artist TalksKeynotes, lectures, moderated conversations, public programs, and gatherings connected to art, ancestry, diaspora, women’s wisdom, organizational ecology, and transformative learning.

A Note on Reciprocity

I am committed to abundance without extraction.

For this reason, I maintain a flexible pricing practice that accommodates institutions with the resources to invest fully, while also creating pathways for artists, women, grassroots communities, and smaller organizations when alignment is strong.

When appropriate, I consider sliding-scale agreements, community-supported rates, honoraria, shared revenue models, and reciprocal exchange. The intention is creating the right relationship.

If this work resonates with you or your community, I welcome a conversation about what wants to be remembered, reimagined, gathered, created, or cultivated.

Get in touch

BasSheva Mañjon, PhD

EmailInstagramLinkedin

Designed by Alé Luya