When you experience the work of artist Tricia Hersey you are witnessing a practice unbound, defying the lines that are often drawn between disciplines, methodologies, and schools of thought. Hersey’s craft has taken a lifetime to perfect. It is deeply influenced by her experiences as the daughter of an abolitionist pastor, as a native of the South Side of Chicago, and as the torch-bearer of her family’s Mississippi and Louisiana roots. Her upbringing is woven throughout her two decades of experience as a teaching artist, chaplain, poet, theatermaker, performance artist, and community organizer. She necessarily dissolves these boundaries to unlock mental, physical, and spiritual spaces for radical thought and imagination. The wideness of her practice opens portals and possibilities of world-building and future-casting while embodying the teachings of somatics, womanism, womanist theology, Black Liberation Theology, Afrofuturism, and her ancestors.

From these vast reservoirs of knowledge, Hersey created the ‘rest is resistance’ and ‘rest as reparations’ frameworks and founded The Nap Ministry, a global pioneer and originator of the movement to understand the liberatory power of rest. Her work is a pathway to the rest practices needed to collectively build and imagine new worlds as we simultaneously dismantle and deprogram ourselves from the systems that prop up and perpetuate the racial, social, and environmental harm done by white supremacy and extractive capitalism.

Hersey has 20 years of experience as a teaching artist, archivist assistant, community activist, and arts-integrated curriculum developer with Chicago Public Schools, Columbia College Chicago, Steppenwolf Theatre, United States Peace Corps, Emory University Rare Books and Manuscript Library, and numerous community organizations and universities in nationwide.

Hersey has exhibited artworks, delivered talks, and created collective napping experiences with School of the Art Institute Chicago, MOCA Cleveland, Speed Museum, Flux Projects, United States Peace Corps, Google Global, MIT, Brown University, and many more. Her words and work have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, PlayBoy, Afropunk, The Atlantic, Complex Magazine, Dutch Vogue, NPR All Things Considered, USA Today, Bon Appetit, and others.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in Public Health from Eastern Illinois University and a Master of Divinity from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. She currently lives in South Georgia with her husband, Tommy, and her son who is nicknamed The Dream.

Faith & Religion, Spirituality, Black Heritage, Women, Women's Empowerment, Feminism, Art Performing Arts, Theatre, Meditation,