About

I write, teach, and create from a distinctly Afro-Atlantic perspective where creolization is a fact of our constant state of movement, from one shore to the other.

Dr. Sheriden Booker is a cultural strategist, scholar, and artist whose work navigates the kaleidoscopic waters of the Afro-Atlantic world at the intersection of race, gender, religion, and the arts. Her research and creative practice explore how Black diasporic communities produce culture, identity, memory, and spiritual life across port cities and their connected sugarlands.

Booker began her career in film and television production at Walt Disney Studios as a fellow of the Emma L. Bowen Foundation for Minorities in Media. An early proponent of narrative justice, her experience in the entertainment industry—and the limited range of nuanced Black stories circulating in Hollywood at the time—inspired her to pursue doctoral training in sociocultural anthropology and African American studies at Yale University.

Today, Dr. Booker teaches in the Black Studies Department at City College of New York while also working as a consultant and strategic advisor to organizations across the cultural, media, and philanthropic sectors. Drawing on her social science background, she partners with foundations, museums, universities, and nonprofit institutions to conduct landscape analyses, perform operational audits, develop culturally responsive strategies, and design collaborative initiatives that strengthen relationships with historically marginalized communities and audiences within the United States and across the greater Afro-Atlantic World.

A central dimension of Booker’s work focuses on African diasporic traditional religious communities, which have often been misrepresented within Western media and public discourse as a legacy of enslavement and colonialism. Through research, advocacy, and public engagement, she works to expand public understanding of these traditions and the cultural ecologies in which they thrive. Her work has taken her across the United States, Nigeria, Brazil, and Cuba, where she has spoken at programs hosted by institutions including the United Nations, the NYC Human Rights Commission, the Osun State Government, the US Census Bureau, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, the Interfaith Center of New York, New York Law School, and Columbia University’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project.

Alongside her scholarship and consulting practice, Booker is also a recording artist and writer. Drawing on archival materials, oral histories, and family accounts, she composes original music and stories that illuminate the histories, cultural traditions, and intimate emotional geographies of the Afro-Atlantic world. Her creative work explores the spaces where rivers meet the sea—sites of migration, exchange, and memory that have shaped the cultural life of Black Atlantic societies for centuries.

Her recent work Sir Dolo (“On the Water”)—a short story and suite of original music honoring Louisiana environmental justice leader Sharon Lavigne—was featured in the exhibition Mitoloji Latannyèr (Mythology of the Palmetto Grove) at the Louisiana State Capitol Park Museum during the 2023–2024 season.