Ayana Omilade Flewellen (they/she) is a Black Feminist, an archaeologist, an artist scholar and a storyteller. Flewellen is the co-founder and current President of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. They were selected for the inaugural 2021-2023 cohort Called By Water, directed by Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Oshun Jones, funded by Solidaire Networks’ Black Liberation Pooled Fund. In 2022 Ayana joined Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology as an Assistant Professor. Her research and teaching interests are shaped by and speak to Black Feminist Theory, historical archaeology, maritime heritage conservation, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, memory, and representations of slavery.
I bring history to life. Making history tangible, as a terrestrial and maritime archaeologist I focus on the African Diaspora, unearthing histories that lay at the foundation of our modern society, which are often understudied, ignored, and missing from history textbooks. Whether diving in the ocean to survey slave shipwrecks or excavating the 18th-century homes of formerly enslaved Africans, my current projects forge pathways for African descendant students and communities to take a leading role in the unearthing and telling of Black history.
These projects come to life through two organizations I am a part of, the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA) and Diving With a Purpose (DWP). Through the SBA, I direct a community collaborative archaeology project that trains students in archaeology. Through DWP, I organize programs that train communities to be underwater advocates, becoming stewards of their local submerged histories. I am a formally trained terrestrial and maritime archaeologist who works on sites of African enslavement on land, as well as slave shipwrecks underwater. My art practice, initially was rooted in the physicality of the ground and took the form of metal and stone adornments and small installation pieces.
More recently, as my archaeological work has shifted from land to sea, my art practice has shifted as I hunger to work in mediums that articulate the new waterscapes sites I excavate. Black Oceanic Breath is a performance art project that takes shape within the liquidity of the Atlantic Ocean at known sites of shipwrecks from vessels that carried enslaved Africans through the Middle Passage. Centered on the Black body as the site for physiological registers of transgenerational trauma and healing, this project explores the potentiality of submerged breath as ecological communion with the ocean (experienced here as kin, ancestor and guide) that reckons with the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its afterlives. Here the act of breathing underwater – as communion – takes on transcorporal potentiality, as the body physiologically adjusts to the weight of the ocean to maintain life while simultaneously experiencing weightlessness. Black Oceanic Breath centers on the idea that within the experience of weightlessness exist the radical potentiality for Black people to breathe as we remember, grieve, and heal from the impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its afterlives. Performance art as ecological communion at submerged sites of Black trauma, declares Black livability and futurity through breath. Through scuba technologies, this project documents my communion with the Atlantic Ocean as I breathe through/with the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Black Oceanic Breath is the performance of communion captured through video and audio recordings of submerged breath meditations, as well as through the creation of intuitive writing prose and drawings birthed underwater. I am currently stretching more into my pursuits as an artist and am at a critical point in my experience as an emerging artist, working towards integrating my academic pursuits in archaeology and my creative pursuits in the arts
