Prema G. Bangera
Artist Statement:
As a queer neurodivergent multidisciplinary artist, my visual art, poetry & prose, and dance are my meditation, my medicine, my spiritual outpouring of love, my incantation for healing, and a disruptor in a conformist white-supremacist world. I create to manifest pathways of love for myself, to honor my divinity and my ancestors, and for growth & true liberation.
My artistic mediums aim to tap into raw emotions and bring forth both the individual and the collective voices of the unheard. My hope is to use creativity as a catalyst for transformational healing for both myself and for my community. I think deeply on the words of Audre Lorde who said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self preservation and that it is an act of political warfare.” My artistic endeavors is my quiet and fierce political work of healing on the individual and collective level whenever possible – it aligns with the truth that the “personal is political.”
My work offers a raw reality of the struggles that the QTDBIPoC (Queer, Trans, Disabled, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community faces on a daily, as well as honing into the joys and cultural beauties that ties us together creating a rich fabric of the community and the strength which brings us together. I believe that healing happens through the courage of compassionate storytelling, where we bring together a collective of perspectives.
Photo Credit: Mel Taing
About the Artist:
Prema G. Bangera (pronounced “pray-ma ben-gay-ra”), who is ethnically South Indian (from Tulu Nadu) of lower caste, born in Mumbai, and partially raised on the unceded land of the Wampanoag and Massachusett people (so-called Boston), is a multidisciplinary artist, a disruptor, a community organizer, a cultural worker, a somatic arts & yogic practitioner, an editor, and an educator. Her writing and artwork has appeared in various publications and showcased at the Boston City Hall and painted on the streets of the unceded Naumkeag lands (so-called Salem, MA) as part of the Raining Project at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.
She was the founder and executive director of a grassroots nonprofit organization, Teen Voices Emerging, which carried on the legacy of the 25-year-old nationally established youth magazine called Teen Voices.
Bangera has established a consulting and arts nonprofit organization called B.A.L.A: BIPoC Ancestral Love as Arts, where “bala” means “strength” and “welcome” in a South Indian language/dialect known as Tulu. This grassroots organization offers many programs/workshops that are aimed to uplift QTDBIPoC (Queer, Trans, Disabled, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community members by addressing systemic oppression through reclaiming our own identities using arts as a catalyst.
She has 15+ years of experience working as a nonprofit leader in the community with a trauma-informed lens. Bangera was selected by the Boston Women's Fund in partnership with the Boston Foundation for their 2022 Women of Color Leadership Circle.
In the past, Bangera was also a teaching artist & writer at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and at the United South End Settlements.
They are a perpetual evolving shapeshifter, a work-in-progress, with their core values of radical love and true liberation intact.