Damali Ayo

Damali Ayo grew up in Washington, D.C. She attended the prestigious Sidwell Friends School on scholarship from grade kindergarten until graduation. From there she attended Brown University where she studied politics and American culture. During her time at Brown she also worked in community involvement, womens issues, and as a writing tutor. She first started working in theatre and performance at Brown University where she designed and directed the Women's Prison Project. Through this program college students taught theatre workshops to inmates at the Rhode Island women's prison. This program is still running today, and has inspired several other programs of its kind across the country. Though she had always been a creative child and person, after college damali thought she would be a writer. She turned to art when she had a dream about a visual art collage that would powerfully describe one of her many experiences with racism at her middle school. She created the work. When she saw the potent impact this work had on its viewers she became an artist. In 2003 she created the web-art-performance work rent-a-negro.com, a Web site that explores the commodification of race and black people. This site was reviewed in Salon.com and from there her work became more widely known and viewed by audiences world wide. Her first book, How to Rent a Negro (2005), was an expansion of the ideas this website, created as a how-to manual for renters and rentals to create their own businesses, or judge their own actions with regards to how they treat others. This landed her an appearance on The Factor (1996) and several other radio appearances internationally. Damali currently lives in Portland, Oregon.