Sarita Covington

Pronouns: she/her

Sarita Covington is a multi-disciplinary artist, racial justice organizer, and social entrepreneur from Harlem. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. She co-founded ACRE (Artists Co-Creating Real Equity), an organizing body of artists and cultural workers that works closely with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond to undo racism in our field and is currently an Affiliate Trainer of Race Forwards public and private Racial Equity Trainings. Her work has received support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Open Meadows Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, SPARC (Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide), and BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange).

Presentations from Facing Race 2024

Much Ado About Dead White Men—Working with the “Classics” while BIPOC in 5 Acts

The norm of the Western Canon privileges the white, cis-gendered male experience while it marginalizes and dehumanizes everyone else. Through storytelling and examples of professional productions on stage, podcast, and screen, we will interrogate and explore how we can deconstruct these biases and find opportunities to re-center multi-identity artists in new cultural models.

In this session, we will unpack our history’s inequitable practices in cultural arts and present ideas that challenge socialized assumptions. We will lift up real-life examples and what we learned from pushing back and taking ownership of art in the image of our diverse world. We will leave the session having stretched our radical imagination and created visionary fiction that inspires our work forward.

Speakers: Sarita Covington, Nelson Eusebio

Presentations from Facing Race 2018

WOC Mamas: Decolonizing Motherhood in Community

Women/ femmes/ gender nonconforming people who move through the world as mothers, educators, activists, organizers, and people of color expend countless amounts of energy educating and caring for others. It is crucial to our survival that we check in and support each other in this journey of decolonizing our parenting. In this session, we will create space to collectively examine our colonized practices of motherhood and challenge our inherited pathologies while strategizing around tools that can support this work in community going forward.

Facilitators will share the framework for our Radical Mama Educator group, which is a NYCoRE (NY Collective of Radical Educators) inquiry-to-action group (ItAG), and all participants will exchange experiences and strategies that allow us to decolonize motherhood while building community. Self-identified women, gender non-conforming, trans women, and femmes who are birth, adoptive, and foster mamas who identify as people of color are invited to invited to pause and reflect on our incredible collective work while recalling the words of Audre Lorde: “we were never meant to survive”. Let us be strategic about building a future in which we not only survive, but we thrive… because if we don’t, who will?

Speakers: Nadia Williams, Sarita Covington