Integrating Arts as a Healing Force

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Louisville native Dr. Jabani Bennett is an interdisciplinary visual artist, yoga instructor, community-engaged educator, leadership consultant, dancer, and mama. She is also the first Black and openly queer director in the University of Louisville Women’s Center’s 30-year history.

The Women’s Center at the University of Louisville (UofL) was founded in 1991 and continues to serve as a resource and space of belonging for women, femmes, and gender-expansive individuals within and outside the UofL community.

Bennett began their tenure in 2023 with priorities that included breathing life into the new organizational mission, operationalizing the intersectional feminist and antiracist goals of the center, and co-creating leadership succession plans.

“The students are always the teachers in my book about which community-engaged practices to implement in a space,” she says. “I am not the expert, and I come to the students openhearted and ready to learn.”

By following the students’ lead, Bennett strives to integrate healing-centered leadership approaches, pleasure activism, and her love for the arts into the center’s programming.

“The aim for active listening to students, staff, faculty, community members, and UofL stakeholders anchors my work in making impactful connections, and my team’s efforts in student coaching and leadership development, cultural programming, and resource-sharing,” says Bennett.

Her new role is transformative because she is returning home to the center in many ways. In the early 2000s, Bennett worked at the center as a graduate student event coordinator under the second director, the late Mary Karen Powers.

“During that time, I witnessed the [Women’s Center’s] first Kentucky Women’s Book Festival and had the chance to drive the late feminist scholar, bell hooks, back to her hotel after her presentation at the festival,” she says.

Bennett received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts with a concentration in painting and a minor in the Spanish language and a master’s degree in teaching in art education with an English as a second language endorsement (PreK-12) from the UofL. They received their Doctor of Education in leadership from Spalding University.

Bennett also grew up in an historic and culturally vibrant area in Louisville, Kentucky, called the West End, comprising many neighborhoods along the Ohio River.

“The West End – also rebranded as West Louisville in recent years – is one of the most densely populated areas of Black folks and folks who are economically vulnerable in the city,” she says. “I grew up feeling shame about my neighborhood despite the community activism demonstrated by my activist parents. I am now proud and understand the source of my childhood embarrassment – oppressive policies and practices that lower the quality of life and life expectancy for residents in this area.”

For Bennett, being a part of the community in intimate ways has given them something to add to conversations on reimagining systems, policies, and community practices.

“I also had the privilege of growing up on [UofL’s] campus as a kid,” she says. “My stepfather, the late Dr. J Blaine Hudson, was a published poet, activist, and scholar of Pan African Studies, so I witnessed as a child the launch of multiple justice-based departments, initiatives, centers, and city plans in the 1990s as well as the players in the strategic leadership teams – many who are no longer here.”

Bennett carries memories of these people and is constantly thinking about ways to honor their hyperlocal and global lens in equity work for student success through the Women’s Center.

“By growing up in Louisville and spending a great deal of time of my childhood on campus, I carry cultural memories that can support future strategic planning efforts for student success,” she says. “Years later, these professional and personal experiences at UofL and in Kentucky also anchor my strategic support and contributions in community development projects.”

The UofL Women’s Center

“Dr. Bennett has been such an impactful leader in their time at the Women’s Center, and I admire her tireless work into having the intersectional feminist and antiracist focus throughout every level of the Women’s Center,” said Abby Maxey-Rezmer, a student leader at UofL.

Maxey-Rezmer worked alongside Bennett and the Women’s Center to plan an International Women’s Day event honoring Louisville’s diversity in racial, cultural, sexual, gender, and physical backgrounds.

“I was so thankful and honored to work with so many of UofL’s student organizations and local community organizations and performance groups to make our event a true place to love, honor, and celebrate everyone wholly and authentically.”

Today, the Women’s Center is part of the brand-new Cultural & Equity Center, which was completed during the pandemic. The center is located in a centralized and student-centered area at UofL.

“In the past, the four centers, the LGBT Center, the Muhammad Ali Institute for Peace and Justice Cultural Center, the Women’s Center, and the Inclusive Excellence & Belonging Training Center, were separated and located at different places on campus,” says Bennett. “Now together, we can more effectively serve students who have multiple social identities and intersecting needs based on those identities.”

On the walls of the Cultural & Equity Center, visitors can find the land acknowledgment honoring Indigenous communities and their contributions. The wall also includes peace phrases in multiple languages, such as the famous quote by legal scholar and professor Kimberlé Crenshaw that says, “The better we understand how identities and power work together from one context to another, the less likely our movements for change are to fracture.”

The center houses student offices and study areas, conference rooms for community gatherings, a library, a dining lounge area, and wellness spaces for lactation, meditation, and napping.

“In my interactions with college students, I strive to anchor conversations with opportunities for real feedback about our progress at the Women’s Center with the goal of authentic student engagement,” says Bennett. “In these experiences of genuine relationship-building, I am not perfect, so I give myself grace as I learn more with each step with my team, colleagues, and community.”

As an interdisciplinary artist, Bennett dreams big for UofL’s Women’s Center, recognizing the importance of historical context regarding relationships between the Women’s Center and the Louisville community.

“I grew up as a young adult in New York City and actively engaged in the arts, public education, and the food justice community, deeply understanding the inequities that exist in that city,” she says. “If I had a good time somewhere, I always wonder – why can’t that happen at UofL, Louisville, or the state?”

Bennett’s work focuses on how infrastructure, resources, and policies can nurture more inclusive, creative, and equitable spaces.

“My life’s work in arts and culture in New York City as a visual arts public school educator, teacher’s union secretary for the New York Arts Teacher Association, studio artist, and cultural equity planner as well as my studies in leadership theory play a critical role in my strategic planning,” says Bennett. “I am highly interested in possibility models, past leadership tactics that triumphed or failed, and lesser-known cultural knowledge that nurtures more inclusive coalition building and community impact.”

Using a Black intersectional feminist approach to their leadership development and capacity building, Bennett asks ‘What do the students need and want foremost in our work?’ This strategy is designed to point to student success, especially for Black, brown, queer, disabled, first-generation, nontraditional, and economically vulnerable students who are invested in gender equity.

“One of my proudest experiences during my time as director is that we increased our scholarships for UofL students for the academic year of 2024-2025,” says Bennett. “We also created community awards to uplift inclusive and impactful leadership practices by individuals and organizations invested in gender equity. We even honored our beloved late Breonna Taylor with the award.”

Celebrating 30 years

One of Bennett’s first projects in their role was hosting the UofL’s Women’s Center’s 30th Anniversary in March 2024.

The center’s team includes Jamieca Jones and Phyllis Webb, both program coordinators with more than a decade of experience at the center working with student parents, female-identifying military-connected students, and strategic partners, Bennett says.

The team’s goal for the celebration was to elevate and highlight the organizational shift to intersectional feminism and an antiracist framework.

“We accomplished this by setting a welcoming vibe for the event with a locally renowned DJ, DJNasti, Destini Carter,” says Bennett. “I wanted to make a multiracial and feminist solidarity model visible, embodied by the presenters and vendors.”

Bennett had the support of the executive director of the Cultural and Equity Center, Leondra Gully, and the assistant vice president for inclusive excellence and belonging, Marian Vasser, whom she says contributed greatly to the ideation phase and the event’s strategic planning.

The event also featured spoken word, spiritual songs, and ancestral calls, a joyful shift from traditional programming events on campus.

“I wanted to honor the folks who demonstrated inclusive and impactful community work in gender equity, many of whom are lesser known to others,” she says. “Through authentic community engagement, strategic marketing, ethical storytelling, and teamwork, we exceeded our original numbers for the event. It was a success and exemplifies the strategic direction for all the Women’s Center events to follow.”

The UofL Women’s Center also hosted an inaugural Gender, Equity & Climate Justice virtual conference this year to highlight the correlations between the well-being of women and families and the stewardship of the Earth.

For the future, Bennett is dreaming about “soul care” – a term coined by Dr. Candice Nicole Hargons at the University of Kentucky, asking what is the “me in the we?”

“I will not be in this position forever due to my passion for cultural equity planning and my goals in my own artmaking, so I want to support strategic leadership succession at the Women’s Center,” she says. “What does that look and feel like?”

Bennett’s long-term goals for the center include cultivating culturally responsive student support, data-driven community engagement, and intersectional solidarity.

“My greatest hope is for our students to know they have access to people, places, and resources they need to be successful in their dreams and goals,” she says. “I said it before – like I am telling myself. Students – you are not alone. Find your people. We are here.”