Who am I?

Ra’anaa Yaminah Ekundayo is a Tiohtià:ke (Montreal, QC)-based emerging multimedia visual activist scholar. Their work explores the intersection of art and activism, particularly contemplating the entanglement of Black identity, community, and futurity. Co-founder and Chair of Black Lives Matter Sudbury, Ra’anaa strives to actively decolonise every facet of their life, supporting calls to defund the police, abolish the prison industrial complex, and for liberation in our lifetime.

A cultural curator, Ra'anaa works with various communities and mediums, exploring radical love, self-care, and joy as an act of resistance and means of liberation. Most recently, they curated Love is the Antidote (Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism, 2024) and Effervescence (Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario, 2025). Since 2018, they have worked alongside Up Here: Urban Arts Festival, supporting the works of national and international installation and mural artists. Ra'anaa's written work is featured in A Thousand Tiny Awakenings (Latitude 46, 2025), Queer Country Crossroads (Caitlin Press, 2025), and as co-editor of The Arts of Black Activism: Black Cultural Politics in Northern Turtle Island 2020-Present (University of Regina Press, 2026).

They produced the award-winning short documentary Collective Resistance (2023) and are a co-creative lead, writer, and actor for the forthcoming short film Can You Feel It Now (2025). Ra'anaa was a 2022 STEPS Public Art CreateSpace Artist-in-Residence, a 2022-23 Barry Pashak Social Justice Graduate Fellow, and a 2023-24 Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism Black Arts Fellow. They hold a master’s degree in architecture and are currently pursuing their SSHRC-funded doctorate in art history at Concordia University, exploring the emergence of Black activist public art in N'Swakamok (Sudbury, ON). A LEGO lover and world-builder at heart, Ra’anaa believes in accessible art that dreams, disrupts, and invites us all to imagine new worlds.

We’re not free until we’re all free.