Kumani Gantt joined the CD Forum in July 2009 as Executive Director. She most recently was the Executive and Artistic Director at The Village of Arts and Humanities (the Village), a community arts center located in North Philadelphia. Founded as a series of interlocking art parks created by Lily Yeh, the Village is a multidisciplinary arts center that executes its mission through the stewardship of 12 art parks and the arts training and leadership development of teens between the ages 13-19. During her tenure, the Village worked with a variety of artists including the Bokamoso Youth Center of Winterveldt, South Africa; poet, Sonia Sanchez; the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange; composer and vocalist, Dr. Ysaye Maria Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock; theater ensemble Ping Chong & Company; storyteller Linda Goss, and visual artists Homer Jackson, Joyce Scott, and Mr. Imagination.
Prior to working at the Village, Kumani was the director of Theater for a New Generation, a project of Center Stage (Baltimore, MD), designed to expand the theater’s young audience between the ages of 14 to 30. Theater for a New Generation was voted best theater education program by the South Eastern Theater Conference in 1997, and its program Encounter was a semi-finalist for the Coming Up Taller Award in 2002. In 2000, she began conducting workshops for the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, a Washington, DC arts and advocacy program for mothers in drug recovery. Kumani has also conducted spoken word and theater workshops at the State Correctional Institute at Graterford, the Baltimore Women’s Detention Center, Power Inside, and the Baltimore City School System. She is a former steering committee member of Philadelphia’s Arts for Youth Initiative, and a former board member of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.
Kumani’s performance and literary work has been described as a “thoughtful, evocation of love and loss” by the Baltimore Sun. Her plays and performance pieces includemeditations/from the ash, winner of the Artscape 1997 Best Play Contest and voted Best New Play by the Baltimore Alternative; Three Stories to the Ground, written with Gabriel Shanks and winner of the Theatre Project Outstanding Vision In Theatre award; anatomy/lessons selected as part of Penumbra Theater’s Cornerstone Project; andCommunion written with actress Vanessa Thomas for Washington, DC’s Horizons Theater, and Testament, a play inspired by Antigone performed by the Village of Arts and Humanities in 2006. In 2003, her collection of poetry, conjuring the dead, was awarded the Maryland Emerging Writers Award by poet, Afaa Michael Weaver. She holds a MFA in Theatre Performance from Towson University.
