Nana Kumi
Co-Creative Director + Founding Member
Nana Kumi is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and land steward from Natchez, Mississippi. Her work integrates folklore, oral history, portraiture, and performance to document and highlight the cultural and historical ties between the Black American South and the African Diaspora.
She is the director of The Spirit in Our Roots project, an art-based land initiative uplifting growers across Mississippi and Louisiana. Her cinematic and visual work has received support from institutions including the National Performance Network, the Documentary & Storytelling Initiative, and Sipp Culture’s Rural Performance Production Lab. Through her ongoing multi-part film and multimedia series, The Earth Holds Weight, she investigates themes of displacement, land inheritance, and cultural identity.
Her practice focuses on challenging narrow narratives of the rural South by framing Mississippi as a fertile landscape of deep historical memory, ancestral knowledge, and collaborative potential for social change.
