About Your Dream Tenders, About AWAKE

Queen Gogo Yemah Takhakhan (b. Jillian Walker), is a Multidimensional Artist & Priestess of Love, Beauty, Possibility & Dreams.

From a heartspace that flows out of The Love of the Ancestors, Gogo incites and inspires sublime new forms of art, structures, and communal systems that break the brutal boundaries of the colonial imagination.

With her spiritual practice as the central portal, she has created and supported over a decade of art in the fields of theater and performance, music, film, television, as well as throughout the academy, in healing spaces, women’s circles, prisons, places of worship, and sacred spaces at and across the oceans.

Queen Gogo Yemah comes from a lineage of teachers, healers and community builders and is rooted in her midwestern US upbringing, her red-dirt southern great-great and 3rd great grandparents, and the ancient ancestors of Southern Africa who called her to initiate and reclaim the medicines and Songs of her people.

She blesses the honor of her lineages through performance and practice. Her most acclaimed work, SKiNFoLK: An American Show (The Bushwick Starr/National Black Theatre: NY Times Critics Pick, Kilroys List, Lilly Award) is published by 53rd State Press. Her other plays and projects have received numerous honors and include Songs of Speculation (JACK, 2020 Third Coast Audio Unbound Award) and Sarah’s Salt.(Winner Columbia@Roundabout, Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist, Relentless Award honorable mention).

One of her favorite descriptions of her onstage work comes from Poet and Prophet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who described her Joe’s Pub concert, Blue Ink, as “Transformational, Black feminist, ancestral-portal-opening, love-centered musical work.”

With her multifaceted training and education in traditional academic spaces (BA: The University of Michigan, MFA: Columbia University) and ancient afro-indigenous traditions (Chief teachers, Makhosi Himi Gogo Thule Ngane, Queen Baba Solstice Kha Ekhaya Esima, Makhosi Foundation), Queen Gogo holds a unique combination of intellectual curiosity, spiritual rigor and an incredible capacity for deep listening and collaboration with people, built and natural worlds, time/space, Ancestors and all of the unseen.

Some of her favorite collaborations include: writing/performing and serving as Process Director with The TEAM (Reconstructing), creating Move, Meditate, Make with Libby King, working as a setlist dramaturg on Common’s Let Love tour, serving as dramaturg of divinity on the second season of Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness (HBO), holding prompt-based performance classes with the students at The University of Washington and Harvard, holding circle with the women in Nisha Moodley’s Soul of Leadership, and sitting in prayer, song and healing space with her spiritual family at the Makhosi Foundation.

Queen Gogo Yemah is the screenwriter, co-composer and co-star of BLK GRK (or, hiding in plain sight), a multiversal, poetic exploration of the history of Black Greek Letter Organizations.

Her onstage script(ure), The Whitney Album, opened at Soho Rep in New York City in May 2023.

Since her last major stage work, Queen Gogo has been in deep listening and devotion to the creation of the dream body of work, AWAKE that makes its home here in theoceanarchives.

Welcome and thank you for being here.

Inyosi Sebenzekhaya (Nia O. Witherspoon)

is the daughter of Marcia Ostrow and Anton Witherspoon. Her medicine flows through her as a writer, song channel, womb-tender and bodyworker, dreamer, creative doula, and Kundalini Yoga teacher–a conjuror, a weaver, a shaper, a nurturer, and a creator supporting mental, physical, and spiritual health by way of deep transformation. Ancestrally guided through the Afro-Indigenous teachings of the Ubungoma lineage, and called to be of service since childhood, Inyosi is a deep listener, an empath, and a natural care-giver. A living testimony and devotee of the body, of Mother Earth, and of the Divine Feminine, she continues to heal through the activated remembrance of the inherent perfection and divine cyclical nature in all things in the continued alignment with the frequency of LOVE.  She is inspired by her ancestors like “Big Joan” (Hattie Moses) who rowed boats through the swamps of South Carolina in the middle of the night to tend the births in her community, and “Aunt Micey” Oree Witherspoon, who healed the body and spirit with prayer and rain water. In the White Phase, she is stepping into a new level of spiritual responsibility; a deeper level of listening, a higher level of trust, and the graceful flow of submersion into the Sacred Waters to rise up as the Queen Bee that Brings the People Home to the Hive.

Out in the world, she is a published author, professional theatre artist, composer, and writing instructor.  She is currently building the foundation to Oshun’s Palace, a full-spectrum menu of ceremonial services for holistic health, birthkeeping, womb-tending, and Ayurvedic + Afro-feminine beauty. Her first book, The Dark Girl Chronicles: A Trilogy will be released in Fall 2025. www.niawitherspoon.com.

About AWAKE

AWAKE is a Portal, a Process, and a Path that takes participants deep into relationship with their sleeping and waking dreams in order to open the creative and spiritual self. Its intention is to reindegnize the mind, rectify the body, and reclaim the spirit from oppression; giving us renewed fortitude to continue transforming the waking world. Comprised of Twelve ‘gates’ of creative prompts, practices and ancient wisdom on dreams, AWAKE is a journey for those who are called to rise in higher relationship to themselves, their lineages, and their imaginations as they dream to transform the waking world.

The Twelve Gates of AWAKE

Gate I | The Body (sample The Body Gate) (listen to a Body pod)

Gate II | The Spirit (sample The Spirit Gate)

Gate III | The Inner Child

Gate IV | The Water (sample The Water)

Gate V | The House (sample The House)

Gate VI | The Practice (sample The Practice)

Gate VII | The Shape (sample The Shape)

Gate VIII | The Soul & The Not-Self

Gate IX | The Cosmic Ancestors

Gate X | Past Lives and Karmic Relationships

Gate XI | The Tree

Gate XII | Technology + Communication