Portfolio
The following are just a few examples of how I see the world, where every space tells a unique story.
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2023
My work centers the pain of displacement, themes of motherhood, adoptees, and diasporic souls reclaiming their power through creative healing.
2018-2022
It all begins with a pain - sometimes new, sometimes old - sometimes in my head and sometimes in my side or my hips. Something is still missing that needs finding.
photograph by
sarah honey young
Healing is political. Healing is ancestral. Healing is art.
photograph by sarah honey young
I believe in radical honesty, tenderness, transformation,
and fighting like hell.
photograph by sarah honey young
thanks for coming to my ted talk
Adopting Identity began in 2014 with $60,000 in seed funding as the first iteration of my ongoing multidisciplinary work. It is a movement for the liberation and self-adoration of people of color raised in multiracial families — those navigating the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, and belonging.
The film, Adopting Identity, is a love story about my search for home as a displaced Afro-Brazilian adoptee. It follows my family’s first trip back to Brazil since my sister and I were adopted in the 1980s, tracing my return to my birthplace in Goiânia, Goiás. Through this journey, I explore the resistance, survival, and reclamation of identity rooted in the legacy of the African diaspora. This work is both personal and political — an act of resistance and remembrance that speaks to displacement, poverty, and the enduring pursuit of wholeness.
“I remember having my first baby. I know people have babies every day and it is magical and terrifying and all of the things, but my Leo is special. You see, she is the first biological relative that I have ever known.
She almost died in the hospital because a white nurse did not listen to my requests. Not one day old and already she was at another intersection of anti-Black institutional memory rooted in historical violence; the American health care system.”
Chapter 11: “Interracial Relationships: How Antiblackness Informs Kinship and Therapist Responsibility,”
-by Liana Maneese, LPC, NCC, MA