Diversity Workshop with Ingrid Askew

Church of Our Saviour was very fortunate to have Ingrid Askew as a guest speaker for a Diversity Workshop.

Biographical Notes

Ingrid Askew grew up in Boston and studied art therapy at Boston University and theater at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She settled in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1978, where she began her career as a cultural activist. In the early 1980s, she founded and was the artistic director of First World Images, a theater ensemble for community actors and students of all ages. In 1983, she was a founding member of New World Theater, a multicultural theater of University of Massachusetts students and community members.

Ingrid is an actress, stage director and cultural activist, whose work has spanned 20 years in the New England area. Most noted for her portrayal of historical Black women, she has performed throughout the east coast of the United States and as far as Australia and South Africa. Her work as resident artist in many New England public schools and cultural centers has brought her much acclaim not only for her artistry, but also for her talent in teaching her students ways in which to address social justice issues by using theater as a vehicle. Ingrid’s commitment to using theater for social change has allowed her the opportunity to assist in the creation of numerous theater projects and cultural programs.

Ingrid Askew is also the co-founder of the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage, a twelve-month pilgrimage that retraced the journey of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade from the United States to the Caribbean, Brazil, Cabo Verde, W. Africa and South Africa. As the coordinating director, she was instrumental in conceptualizing and solidifying this historical sojourn. Askew developed educational theater presentations with participants of the Interfaith Pilgrimage by focusing on themes relative to the Middle Passage and slavery.

“I am an Actress, Director, Educator and Cultural Activist committed to using the arts to create social change within individuals and their communities.”

Ingrid now resides in Cape Town, South Africa where her extraordinary work with Township youth, community artists, and cultural workers has been warmly received. Ingrid is committed to working with people who have been living on the fringes of society by helping them realize their full potential and beauty through the arts.

The Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage

Ingrid met Sister Clare Carter in 1990 when she was the keynote speaker at a Martin Luther King Day breakfast that Clare attended. The two quickly became friends and, soon after, Ingrid became a lay Buddhist in the Nipponzan Myohoji order. When Clare approached her with the idea of an interfaith pilgrimage, Ingrid took to it immediately. It took five years to plan the pilgrimage and one full year to walk it. Ingrid, Sister Clare, and Ingrid's daughter Raina were among the 50 pilgrims who finished the pilgrimage on June 12, 1999, in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2003 PBS focused on the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage in its series, "This Far by Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys."

Ingrid feels that her experience on the Interfaith Pilgrimage taught her to go deeper in her work. No longer is producing a play or writing a poem the central focus; it is about helping her students get in touch with their true spirits and know that they can be whatever they want to be.

“The idea [of the Pilgrimage] was to begin a process of healing the wounds of slavery, looking at racism, which is the legacy of slavery. And so she [Clare] said that she would like to have her Order initiate a pilgrimage that would do that, and that we would go to Africa, where it all began, and retrace the Middle Passage journey, back through the Caribbean and possibly Brazil, and to the United States.

…I told her I thought it was the most incredible idea that was ever presented to me, or project for me to get involved in, but that I wasn’t sure if I knew any people of African descent that would want to go to Africa to leave it again. And so I said, “Let’s restructure it… Let’s look at reversing the history. Let’s retrace the journey.” Because for me personally, and for African Americans (I think I can speak for all of us), when you lose something, you– what do you do? The first thing to do is, you retrace your steps… you retrace until you find what you lost. And so that’s how I felt the journey should be taken. And Clare agreed. And so I said, “No, we must start here and move backwards, until we go back to the mother continent.” – Ingrid Askew, in the PBS series, “This Far by Faith”

Work in South Africa

Ingrid moved permanently to Cape Town in November of 1999, where she founded the Ikhwezi Cultural Arts Ensemble, a group of young Xhosa men, ages 19 to 26, who live in the Cape Town townships. She also works at Bonne Esperance, a shelter for refugee women and children from the Congo, Rwanda, and Angola. She is organizing a conference for African and African American women to come together and discuss spiritual connections and economic development. With South African playwright Fatima Dike, Askew is coordinating a group of African students and students from the University of Louisville to perform a play honoring the Africans who died in the Middle Passage.

Sources for more information :

More biographical details on Ingrid Askew:

1) from “This Far by Faith” www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/witnesses/ingrid_askew.html. 2) From The Fund for Women Artists: www.womenarts.org/network/profile_25.html

About the Interfaith Pilgrimage: http://www.peacepagoda.org/pilgrimage.htm

About the PBS series, “This Far by Faith”: http://postgazette.com/tv/20030623faith0623fnp3.asp

For a copy of a newsletter detailing some of Ingrid’s work with youth in South African Townships: http://www.womenarts.org/network/artistdocs/Nzwebnews03.pdf

"This Far by Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys," is a six-hour PBS series which chronicles the past three centuries of black religious life. Using archival photography and compelling re-creations, the series follows the arrival of enslaved Africans to America, travels through the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Great Depression and the Civil Rights era to reveal the origins and connections between black faith and cultural values. It ends where faith began—in Africa. The final episode chronicles the interfaith, multiracial Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage as it journeys from Massachusetts to the slave forts at Goree Island, Senegal, on the coast of West Africa.

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The Church of Our Saviour is handicapped accessible.

453 Adams Street (617-698-4757)
at the corner of Adams & Babcock Streets – near East Milton Square
The Rev. George H. Welles, Jr., Rector (508-580-8312)
Ms. Roseanna Fernandes, Director of Music & Education Coordinator
Mr. William Keyes, Sexton