Homegrown Dialogues is a collaborative partnership between Andromeda Turre and scholar Mark Lomanno. They will present Homegrown Dialogues: Womanist Perspectives on Spirit, Sound, and Sustainability, a symposium selected for presentation by Yale’s Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture Initiative later this year.

This project builds upon Turre’s programmatic jazz suite From the Earth and Lomanno’s ongoing monograph project, which explores how African American jazz musicians describe their daily lives, music-making, and community-building through allusions to rituals and beliefs historically rooted in African spiritual and religious practices. The symposium brings together Turre, her ensemble, BIPOC climate experts, and leading womanist scholars for a day of performance and dialogue centered on Afrodiasporic ecologies, community-based activism, and spiritual traditions. Framed through a womanist lens, Homegrown Dialogues situates Turre’s suite within the historical continuum of Black feminist ecologies, connecting jazz’s oral tradition to ancestral healing, land stewardship, and conjure practice. Each of From the Earth’s biosphere-based movements—Earth, Sky, Sea, and Ice—will be performed and followed by panel discussions bridging music, ecology, activism, and sacred knowledge.