Member Focus: Ayana Zaire Cotton
meet ayana (she/they)
A new Common Ground member, Ayana Zaire Cotton is a Black feminist artist and cultural worker who brings their expertise in creative practices and teaching software engineering into our space and out to the community. They have a depth of experience working with organizations such as The Hirshhorn (a contemporary art museum), Flatiron School (a coding bootcamp), and Girls For A Change (a Richmond non-profit) and their work has won awards and residencies in Richmond and beyond.
Tell Us more about your craft
Alongside teaching, Ayana’s practice includes working across a variety of mediums and methods, including clay, textiles, code, speculative fiction, design, performance, and independent publishing. In 2022, Ayana decided to extend their art practice into social practice by establishing Seeda School.
Today, Ayana spends most of their time at Common House building and teaching throughSeeda School, a skill-building platform for learning how to code through a black feminist lens. And if that weren’t enough, Ayana also publishes a newsletter and hosts a podcast titled Soft, Where?
Tell us a bit about Seeda School and how you’re bringing coding opportunities to the community.
“The name Seeda is inspired by the computer science concept, ‘database seeding’ or ‘seed data’, Ayana explains. "Learn Entity Framework Core defines seed data as, 'data that you populate the database with at the time it is created. You use seeding to provide initial values for lookup lists, for demo purposes, proof of concepts, etc.' The name Seeda is also inspired by African ancestors braiding seeds in my hair as a transportation technology, Octavia E. Butler’s speculative fiction religion Earthseed, the 'seed shape' of a fractal, and all other liberatory metaphors and stories related to “seeds”.
How does it work? The Seeda School learning portal hosts a video library of web development resources, tutorials, and step-by-step project builds inspired by black feminist worldbuilding practices. We also host live weekly coaching calls to provide support, accountability, and structure along the Seeda School learner’s coding journey. Our community of learners include artists, community organizers, teachers, and MySpace millennials looking to engage with coding inside their creative practice and political imagination. The school is currently based 100% online, with upcoming experiments to host pop-up classrooms in public libraries, and a long-term vision of a campus for black feminist artists and technologists nestled inside a forest garden.
How did you find Common House? And what about the club is conducive to your own practice?
“I found out about Common House through friends in Richmond’s creative community. Building a school in a social centric space such as Common House makes a lot of sense. As a teacher and forever learner, I’m able to learn from and alongside creative practitioners inside the House daily, paving the way for transdisciplinary ideas and future collaborations.”
For more information and to learn about the ecosystem of Ayana’s creative practices, please visit their website.