Early Life
damali ayo was born Damali Ayo Patterson, February 26, 1972 in Washington, DC She attended Sidwell Friends School from kindergarten through high school. She legally dropped her last name in 1995.
Ayo earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1990 from Brown University with a double concentration in Public Policy and American Civilization. While at Brown, ayo served as the director of the student-run Women In Prison Project, a community involvement project that placed undergraduate women as theatre instructors in the Rhode Island women's correctional facility. After college she spent time as a farmhand on a small farm in Pembroke Maine. She returned to Providence where she worked as a house painter, then new-age book store clerk, before spending a year as the Program Director for the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ), and three years as the co-director of their leadership camp program, Anytown. She moved to Chicago for six months, where she worked in a CD store. ayo moved to Portland, OR in 1997 where she began making visual art, and co-founded defunkt theatre company. After establishing her career as a self-taught artist, she was invited to apply to Portland State University and earned a Master of Fine Arts in studio art in 2006. Her first book was published in 2005.
Read more about this topic: Damali Ayo
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Probably more than youngsters at any age, early adolescents expect the adults they care about to demonstrate the virtues they want demonstrated. They also tend to expect adults they admire to be absolutely perfect. When adults disappoint them, they can be critical and intolerant.”
—The Lions Clubs International and the Quest Nation. The Surprising Years, I, ch.4 (1985)
“It is not enough that our life is an easy one. We must live on the stretch, retiring to our rest like soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking forward to the strenuous sortie of the morrow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)