Litm(us), Black Beauty School + Decolonial Teaching Practice

My teaching practice moves through classrooms, salons, universities, community spaces, workshops, digital platforms, social space, and independently built learning environments. Across those spaces, I have been developing a pedagogy rooted in Black embodiment: asking what becomes possible when the body is not treated as an abstraction, commodity, problem, or object of study, but as a living site of memory, knowledge, relationship, creativity, and transformation.

Litm(us) emerged as the theoretical arm of this work, examining the African and Black body within and against systems that have historically transformed bodies into commodity. It asks participants to consider what colonial systems required us to forget about body, hair, adornment, belonging, gender, beauty, and relationship—and what becomes available when we begin remembering through the body itself.

Black Beauty School developed as the embodied and practical arm of that inquiry. Beginning in 2019 and later expanding through the self-funded Black Beauty School West Coast Tour in 2021, the coursework brought together Afro hair theory, color theory, technique, product knowledge, shampooing, styling, history, and community practice. I developed and taught this work alongside Siir Cole, moving it through salons, universities, workshops, and community learning spaces.

My years inside the beauty industry made the limitations of colonial cosmetology increasingly clear. Black hair generates enormous cultural and economic value while the systems built to teach, service, and sell to Black bodies repeatedly remove our hair from embodiment. Texture becomes classification. Care becomes management. Technique becomes speed. The body becomes customer, model, or commodity.
Black Beauty School became a place to investigate what that framework could not hold.

That research did not end with the coursework. It became part of the foundation for Afro ABCs and eventually Afroscape, my developing field guide and larger body of research that approaches Afro hair as terrain: living, responsive architecture shaped by moisture, density, environment, manipulation, nervous system, culture, time, material, and relationship. What began as an effort to teach differently became a deeper investigation into whether Afro hair can ever be adequately understood through a system designed to classify and control it.

The teaching practice continues beyond hair. Within the larger BespokeCurry Cosmos, I develop learning experiences across jewelry and adornment design, visual and material making, embodiment, colorism, social media and decolonization, community formation, Black young-adult experience, creativity, accessibility, and the relationships between bodies and the systems they inhabit. A jewelry workshop, a hair class, a conversation about color, or an embodied creative exercise may begin with different materials, but each becomes a way of returning attention to the body and what surrounds it: how we adorn it, move it, tend it, understand it, make meaning through it, and build relationship with ourselves and one another. The medium changes, but the larger inquiry remains connected.

That methodology now moves through the BespokeCurry Cosmos as a laboratory in motion. The Traveling BespokeCurry Cosmos brings the practice into festivals, pop-ups, workshops, classrooms, community spaces, and other public encounters where teaching, making, conversation, observation, and research and development can happen together. These spaces are not simply places where completed work is presented. They are field stations where the work continues becoming. How people encounter an object, what they are curious about, what needs explanation, where access breaks down, what invites participation, and what unexpected relationships emerge all become information that can move back into the studio, the writing, the teaching, the objects, and the larger Cosmos.

My teaching methodology is relational: encounter what is present, study how it behaves, understand its constraints and possibilities, experiment, make connections, and create conditions in which another way of knowing can emerge. I am not interested in simply transferring information. I build environments where knowledge can become embodied.