Patrisse Cullors

Patrisse Cullors is an artist, abolitionist organizer, and one of the three co-founders of the Black Lives Matter network. She is the author of When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, published in 2018, and An Abolitionist's Handbook, published in 2022. Her work across the past decade has woven together performance art, prison-abolition organizing, and writing on mental-health and survival in Black communities. She holds an MFA in studio art from the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design.

Her abolitionist work spans local Los Angeles organizing (including the founding work of Reform LA Jails and subsequent county-level organizing efforts), broader national organizing around carceral reform and abolition, and the long international conversation about what abolition means in practice across different geographies and institutional contexts. Her performance-art practice has placed her work in galleries and performance venues across Los Angeles, New York, and internationally.

Her mentor focus is the artist-organizer practice and the slow work of building a creative practice that draws meaningfully on organizing work without instrumentalizing it. The studio-and-organizing-time balance. The funding stack for artist-organizers (the fellowships, grants, residencies, and adjacent income streams that have sustained her own practice). The decisions about when to make work and when to organize and how to allow the two to inform each other rather than compete.

Her secondary mentor focus is abolitionist frameworks and the writing-as-organizing work. The specific work of writing memoir as movement labor — what is shared, what is held private, who is represented and how, the editorial and publishing decisions that shape what a memoir can do for the broader political project. The relationship between individual mental-health and survival writing and the structural-political writing that frames it.

Mentees who book with Patrisse come from three primary populations. First: artist-organizers in the first ten years of practice trying to figure out how to sustain both the studio practice and the organizing work. Second: writers working on memoir or long-form essay work that draws on organizing experience. Third: organizers considering whether their work belongs in the abolitionist-framework conversation and how to engage with that framework with the rigor it requires.

Her style is reflective. The session moves at the pace the question deserves. She does not rush through the work to deliver a quick answer; she sits with the specifics. Mentees who come prepared for a longer working conversation find the session most useful.

Outside the direct organizing work and the studio practice she has been adjunct faculty in art-and-social-practice programs, has held visiting-artist positions at multiple universities, and continues to publish across art-criticism and political-essay venues. Her engagement with the public platform is selective and consistent with the long arc of the work.

She is a member of the Creative Arts and Media Circle network here, contributes to the Mental Health and Therapy network on the topics of writing-and-mental-health and on the specific framing of survival and wellness in abolitionist context, and is occasionally active on the Strong Black Woman Trope Deconstruction network on the topics of rest, refusal, and the deconstruction work as artistic practice. Her sessions are free of session-fee charge in keeping with her movement-mentorship orientation.

The pre-session brief asks: current artistic and organizing practice, specific work in progress or decision in front of the mentee, and one piece of creative work (visual, written, or performance-documentation) the mentor can review. She reviews the work before the session. The session structure is loose; she works the specific question with reflection as method. Mentees leave with written notes summarizing the specific reflections, references, and next-step decisions discussed.

Her writing practice spans memoir, essay, and the handbook form that An Abolitionist's Handbook represents. The shift between forms is deliberate. The memoir reaches one kind of reader; the handbook reaches another. The performance-art practice reaches still another. The infrastructure of multi-form practice is part of what she works with mentees on when the conversation moves into the artist-organizer career-arc territory.

On the prison-abolition framework she is rigorous. The framework is older than the current visibility moment and has theoretical and operational lineages that members of the broader Black-women-led abolition tradition have built across many decades. Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and many others have shaped the framework. She locates her own work inside that broader genealogy with honesty about what she has learned from whom.

Her studio practice has been recognized in art-world venues that have not always known how to honor work that is grounded in movement labor. The navigation of those venue relationships — what to accept, what to decline, how to keep the work grounded when institutional incentives pull toward decontextualizing it — is part of what she shares with mentees who are themselves navigating gallery, museum, and adjacent venue relationships.

Her mental-health and survival writing carries particular weight given the very public scrutiny she has faced across the past decade as a public figure associated with movement work. She is candid about what that scrutiny has cost and how she has held her practice and her mental health through it. Mentees considering public-platform work that may carry adjacent scrutiny benefit from this honesty.

Her engagement in the platform's Creative Arts and Media Circle, the Mental Health and Therapy network, and the Strong Black Woman Trope Deconstruction network spans her practice across art, organizing, and survival-and-wellness work. Her contributions to discussion threads on the topics of writing-as-mental-health-practice, performance-art-as-political-practice, and the deconstruction-of-strength work specifically are substantive and reflective in keeping with the slower pace of her broader practice. The mentor sessions she offers match that pace.

The creative-industries landscape continues to evolve in ways that affect Black women creators and creative-industries professionals specifically. The financing landscape for films, books, and adjacent creative-industries projects has shifted across the past decade. The platform landscape has shifted. The agent-and-publisher relationships have shifted. The mentor practice connects specifically to the senior-level craft questions and to the structural conditions that determine whether individual creative-industries careers progress at parity.

Sessions are 45 minutes. The pre-session brief is a working draft (visual, written, or performance documentation, no more than thirty pages or comparable visual material) and a one-page statement of the question. She reads the work before the session. The session structure is reflective. Mentees leave with written notes summarizing specific reflections, references, and next-step decisions.