As a retreat center we envision nurturing artistic and spiritual development steeped in revolutionary principles and guided by relationship building between people and the land for healing.
To foster healing, learning, and connection for individuals, community and Earth centering BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists, activists, and healers.
Our programming aligns with four modalities of healing
Reservations + Land Administrator (Staff)
Alice Butts (she/her) is a visual and graphic artist from Brooklyn, NY and alumni of the School of Visual Arts. As a graphic designer, she invests in community centered projects to support well-being and connection. She is passionate about sharing Black pride through art and committed to develop user experiences that are inclusive of Black queer voices as a necessary disruption to the design world. As a founding member, Alice is thankful to be a part of the healing and development of Black, Indigenous, and people of color artists, activists, healers, and community centering LGBTQ people here at Rootsprings by greeting and hosting guests. For 20+ years, Alice has designed with several companies primarily in the music industry before focusing more directly on social impact. Her professional credits span industries and sectors to create imagery and designs that serve community and clients alike.
Photo Credit: Nayelie Avalos
Board Treasurer
Signe Harriday (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and activist who uses theatre to explore our identities and relationships. She is a founding member of Million Artist Movement, a cooperative committed to Black liberation and healing. Signe has lived in and served many years on the Board of a limited equity housing coop. She is the Artistic Producing Director at Pillsbury House + Theatre in Minneapolis.
Zoe Hollomon is a multi-racial black, queer, farmer, activist and abolitionist. She is the eldest of 3 siblings and comes from a long line of freedom fighters. Zoe was born in Duluth, MN, but grew up in NC (Charlotte) and NY (Buffalo and NYC). She has worked in food justice and community food systems for over 20yrs. Zoe is a co-founder and the Executive Director of the Midwest Farmers of Color Collective, a regional network of farmers organizing for racial equity and food sovereignty. Zoe is a visual artist and has a few pieces around the farm. Zoe’s a member of the Subversive Sirens, a MN based Synchronized Swimming team committed to black liberation, equity in aquatics, queer visibility, and radical body acceptance.
Photo Credit: Nayelie Avalos
Board President
Erin Sharkey (she/they) is a writer, abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the editor of A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars (Milkweed Editions ’23). Erin is a founding coop member of the Fields at Rootsprings, a retreat and respite space in central MN, and co-founder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt. She is the producer of film projects, including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution, which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, Givens Foundation, Penumbra Theatre, Coffee House Press, Bell Museum of Natural History, Black Visions, Headwaters Foundation, and Jerome Foundation. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
Pramila Vasudevan is an interdisciplinary artist working through movement and the founder and artistic director of GUTSOIL ARTS, a platform for artistic research that studies plant life to develop movement vocabularies, choreographic knowledge, and new ways of gathering. Of Tamil descent, she lives and works on Dakota land. Her practice begins with sustained observation of plant life—its growth, adaptation, vitality, and cycles—as a way of generating movement, performance, and installation. Working across movement, sound, drawing, sculpture, and social practice, she creates experiences that invite audiences into new relationships with place and with the life surrounding us.
From 2004–2024, Vasudevan founded and led Aniccha Arts, an arts collaborative that created site-specific performances exploring agency, voice, and collective dynamics within community histories, institutions, and systems. This work laid the foundation for her current artistic inquiry, which extends her interest in collective experience through ecological observation and embodied practice. Vasudevan serves on the board of Rootsprings, where she supports its mission of nurturing artistic and spiritual growth through connection with land. She is an Artist Associate at Pillsbury House Theatre and continues to serve as a national mentor for Naked Stages, supporting the development of early-career performance artists.
Her work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, United States Artists, the Joyce Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation.
Michael Kleber-Diggs (he/him) is a Saint Paul-based poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. He is the author of the poetry collection Worldly Things, and his poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael joined the Rootsprings board motivated by the mission and vision of the organization. He believes that rest, time in nature, cooperative teams, and thoughtful stewardship are pathways to liberation. Although he is a working artist now, he was originally trained as an attorney. Michael likes to bring his logical practical side and his creative sides together to support community building through nonprofit board service and other volunteer work.
Nneka Onwuzurike (she/they) is a writer, policy advisor, donor organizer, and facilitator. She is the Community Wealth Building Lead for the City of Chicago, Mayor’s Office. Working at the intersection of the Office of Equity & Racial Justice and the Business and Neighborhood Development team, Nneka designs programs that build choice, power, wealth, and healing for historically disinvested neighborhoods.
Nneka is the former Rootsprings Lead Donor Organizer, leading the $2M cultivating campaign. She is also working on a collection of lyric essays and short stories. She has received fellowships and grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Loft Literary Center, Intermedia Arts, the Givens Foundation for African-American Literature, and VONA/Voices. Nneka received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Washington University in St. Louis and is on a leave of absence from a joint Master of Public Policy and Master of Business Administration program at Harvard.
Raeesa has been doing a wide array of intersectional anti-oppression work for over 15 years. She identifies as a queer, South Asian, Muslim woman and child of an immigrant, and forever a youthworker who’s working to build systems of collective care that truly honor the dignity of all people. Professionally she has worked in community non-profits but she believes her charge starts with her interpersonal relationships, including with the land.
Raeesa brings a justice lens to her formal and lived training in intercultural understanding. She has bridged connection among community with young people, colleagues, neighbors and family along lines of age, carceral status, race, gender, sexuality, class, religion and more. She gets excited about facilitating healing-centered spaces, the possibility that can come out of conflict, what genuine repair looks like after harm and supporting community to realize individual and collective power. She loves learning and co-imagining new futures.
Anaïs is a cultural worker, musician and published writer whose work focuses on migration, memory and cultural revitalization. With 15 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, Anaïs’s professional background spans community organizing, public policy, social justice training and facilitation, narrative strategy, and executive leadership.
Engagement Manager
Za’Nia Coleman (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and co-founder of the Tangible Collective. Her primary medium is film focusing on documentary and oral history. She has been holding spaces and creating experiences that center Black Millennial thought and expression in the Twin Cities for over five years. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies from Augsburg University in April 2018, with a double major in Film Production and Theory and Culture.
The root of her work is sustaining traditional and historical practices around love, pleasure, cultural expression and community building.
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