Denise Farai Williams is an embodied antiracist facilitator & cultural organizer, educator, creative activist and performing artist. Farai is the founder & lead embodied antiracist facilitator, educator and strategist for Dynamizing Equity™. With a deep curiosity in nervous system-responsive self care, she invites participants to create more mental, physical, spiritual, internal space while employing a variety of cultural, somatic and historical learning prompts, to de-mechanize the body and build its capacity for revealing, feeling, healing and dealing with systemic racism and anti-blackness. Farai’s background in anti-racism, cultural organizing and social equity work brings an understanding of power and privilege to her facilitation. Therapeutic in nature, she boldly holds authentic and compassionate space for people from diverse backgrounds and experiences. She currently also serves as Program Director for the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI). She is a Trainer in Training with the People’s Institute for Survival & Beyond (PISAB) and Center for Story-based Strategy (CSS); a member-facilitator with Parcon Resilience and the School Reform Initiative (SRI) as well as, faculty-facilitator with the Southern Jamaica Plain Health Centers’, Racial Reconciliation & Healing Project. She’s recently served as the DEI Director for METCO HQ.
Coupled with her embodied antiracist and DEI work, Farai is a national performing artist, director and theater of the oppressed (TO) facilitator. A native Bostonian and 2018 Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, Artist-in-Residence, she produced a multi-media performance piece, Surveil Me – which captured some of the last footage of the beloved champion activist & community organizer, Chuck Turner. Farai has performed or produced countless artistic presentations, interventions and performances. She’s currently a featured honoree of the long-time community organizer, ‘Samantha Sadd’, Women in Community ARTS, Trading Cards and has also been the recipient of Madison Park Development Corporations’, Sparks for the Arts. Having served as Artistic Director for Project HIP HOP’s youth program and directed iterative and inventive pieces such as, The Black Citizenship Project, for the Design Studio for Social Intervention (Ds4SI), Farai has made an indelible imprint in the community for social justice and social change. Farai holds a master’s of fine arts degree from the I.A.T.T. Institute at Harvard University and Moscow Theater Arts and a Bachelors of Arts from Emerson College.