Hello, my name is Erika, a liberation arts based critical peace educator and permie.

After working with indigenous schoolchildren and the public school system in Mindanao, I pursued Anthropology & Education and Indigenous Studies at Columbia University to re-imagine new forms of dialogue, social action, and ways of engaging in decolonizing research that involves a more egalitarian process. In the course of my studies, I became involved in Theater of the Oppressed at TOPLAB in NYC and Gas & Electric Arts in Philly. Their incredible work deeply resonated with me--so much so that I packed my bags and moved to the opposite coast to study with the University of Southern California's Applied Theater Arts graduate program. Their thrust of Liberation Arts & Community Engagement exposed me to different modalities of the work with genocide survivors, gender justice warriors, immigrants working for community land trust, youth fighting myriad systemic issues such as the school-prison-pipeline and drug-related gang violence, former convicts working to rebuild their lives, psychiatric ward residents changing the stigma around mental health, and female domestic workers standing up against sexual harassment. After a residency in Centro Teatro do Oprimido in Rio de Janeiro, I studied with Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in Northern California because I was drawn to Liberation Permaculture, where disenfranchised communities of color empower themselves by building self-sufficient, resilient communities through the tools of permaculture.

A thread that runs throughout all these democratic spaces is an ethics of possibility that I am weaving into Lunangan Imaginarium, a non-profit project whose vision is a more humanizing and regenerative world. To realize this, I host liberation arts based humans rights workshops for communities facing social justice issues in order to build their personal and collective resources for resilience, dialogue, and the practice of possibility. The ecological play-space guided by permaculture principles is in itself a prefiguration of the regenerative world we seek and need to thrive.

Lunangan means “mud puddle” in the Visayan language. In the liminal, dialogic space of mess and fun, of healing and wallowing, of wrestling and play, life is reflected upon, wrestled with, and then created anew. "We make the road by walking." I've been belly-flopping into mud puddles along the way; thank you for visiting and mud-puddling with me. ◡̈

Lunangan