A COMPREHENSIVE PERSONAL NARRATIVE

Akeema-Zane was born and raised in Harlem in a working class family. She is a descendant of a rich Caribbean cultural heritage bred with  intergenerational knowledge, and lived customs. Her upbringing was grounded in collective care, storytelling, labor, and community responsibility. These early experiences shaped her understanding of culture not as abstraction, but as a living system—one transmitted through practice, ritual, and relationship.

Her early education within the New York City public school system reflected the city’s tracking structures, situating her in zoned schools with limited institutional responsiveness to her lived experience. A formative shift occurred when she transferred to The Children’s Storefront, an independent tuition-free school founded by American poet and educator Ned O’Gorman. The school’s philosophy, infrastructure, and commitment to dignity-centered education offered a specialized learning environment in which she thrived. While she later developed a critical understanding of the tokenization embedded in elite access pathways, at the time the school’s holistic model affirmed her intellectual curiosity, creativity, and sense of possibility.

Through the advocacy of a placement coordinator who recognized both the benefits and prestige associated with elite secondary education, Akeema-Zane was placed at an academically rigorous all-girls boarding school. There, she encountered curricula that often felt culturally unresponsive to her experience, particularly outside the humanities and social scien. This dissonance posed academic challenges but also clarified the arts as a primary site of fluency, agency, and critical engagement. In her first year as a photography student, she received The Emily Christopher Award in Photography, including a scholarship supporting lab fees. She graduated with distinction in photography, completing AP Photography and receiving the Ann Huidekeeper Brown Art Award for outstanding individual work. These recognitions would later affirm her creative practice as both a language and a method of inquiry.

Parallel to her education, Akeema-Zane entered professional life at an early age. At fourteen, she worked as a Teacher’s Assistant in Head Start programs at The Children’s Storefront, supporting children ages five to ten through one-on-one literacy instruction, writing development, and family communication. As an alumna, she continued working at the school in increasingly complex roles, including administrative assistant under the Head of School, Development and Finance and Operations offices where she supported upper school curriculum planning through collaboration with sixth through eighth grade faculty. 

Over several years, she worked closely with the school’s leadership and operations teams, serving as an assistant to the Development Associate, the Director of Finance and Operations, and the Head of School. Her responsibilities ranged from donor relations and event coordination to institutional administration. She also served as Alumni Coordinator, a role that required conducting sensitive outreach to graduates across multiple cohorts to gather detailed data on post-graduation outcomes, including educational attainment, employment, and incarceration. This work demanded discretion, rigor, and care, as she simultaneously maintained a database, reported regularly to school leadership, and ultimately delivered a dataset used to support Robin Hood Foundation grant funding. She later returned to the school as a guest speaker for graduations, donor events, and benefit programs.

Immediately following her boarding  school tenure at Westover School in Middlebury, Connecticut, Akeema-Zane ventured to Virginia to attend Hampton University as a Pre-Law major. Prior to college, she interned at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, first within the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor under Deputy Chief Assistant Rhonda Ferdinand. There, she participated in legal roundtables addressing remand and rehabilitation decisions, attended court hearings and arraignments, and assisted senior staff. The following year, she returned to the DA’s Office within Community Affairs, where she helped facilitate the high school internship program by assigning students to bureaus, coordinating programming, and supporting recruitment efforts. During this time, she interviewed Judge Michael Corriero, publishing the interview in the program’s annual newsletter.

Her commitment to youth development continued in 2007 when she served as Intern Coordinator for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s junior high and high school programs. In this role, she managed recruitment, mentorship, scheduling, lecture planning, and special programming, drawing from her own experience as a former intern to guide younger participants.

At the conclusion of her sophomore year, Akeema-Zane made a decisive shift, leaving Hampton University to participate in an international youth leadership program in Cambodia through The One World Foundation. There, she worked as an educational facilitator emphasizing English as a second language for students ages five to nineteen, while also serving as assistant to the program coordinator for the international NGO Bridges Across Borders (BABSEA). Her responsibilities included curriculum design, youth group facilitation, policy and grant writing, research across NGO sites, and authorship of organizational newsletters and updates.

She continued her leadership with The One World Foundation as an alumna, traveling to Uganda in 2009 and Senegal in 2010 as a co-coordinator. In these roles, she facilitated youth leadership workshops centered on human rights and social justice, supporting participants in developing strategies to address sexual violence, educational access, and systemic inequality. She later returned to Uganda as a consultant, conducting a mid-summer evaluation in Gulu during the aftermath of a prolonged civil conflict, working alongside local NGOs to support youth-centered community initiatives.

Following her return to the United States, Akeema-Zane transferred to Eugene Lang College at The New School, where her academic focus shifted decisively toward the wider humanities. She served as a teaching assistant for a British Literary Ecologies course with Dr. Elaine Savory and pursued an interdisciplinary course of study grounded in Caribbean and postcolonial literature. Her undergraduate thesis, completed under the supervision of Dr. Tracyann F. Williams, culminated in a self-designed concentration on the Anglophone Caribbean.

Through coursework such as Narratives of Black Women and her thesis research, Parton developed a methodological approach that integrates historical inquiry, literary analysis, and feminist critique. Her work examined figures such as Mary Seacole alongside contemporary analyses of Jamaican higglers, Haitian revolutionary politics, and the ecofeminist dimensions of land and body in texts such as Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, particularly in the context of the 2010 earthquake.

Across these experiences, Akeema-Zane’s trajectory reflects a sustained engagement with education, culture, and justice as interdependent systems. Her practice—spanning administration, pedagogy, research, and the arts—emerges from lived experience and institutional fluency, positioning her to work at the intersection of cultural production, youth development, and structural care.

Following the 2010 earthquake, Akeema-Zane’s academic and political commitments began to cohere into a more clearly articulated artistic core. This shift was catalyzed through her work at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she was a Schomburg–Mellon Humanities Fellow in 2009. Interfacing directly with scholars in Black Studies and working in close proximity to archival collections, research fellows, and primary source materials, she encountered the archive not only as a site of preservation, but as a living, generative space. This access reactivated the artistic distinctions she had earlier cultivated through photography, reconnecting creative practice to research, history, and cultural memory.

During her fellowship, Akeema-Zane deepened her focus on Anglophone Caribbean scholarship through lectures and seminars led by scholars including Stuart Hall, Robert Hill, Harvey Neptune, and Deborah Thomas. These engagements challenged her to locate her own intellectual and creative position within Caribbean thought. Her culminating projects at The Schomburg reflected this inquiry: a collaborative multimedia project that unpacked and complexified dominant narratives surrounding Trinidad’s 1990 Coup d’État, and an individual research project that drew on texts such as Pathology and Identity: The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad to reexamine sociological constructions of Caribbean matriarchy. Together, these works marked an early integration of research, visual analysis, and narrative reframing that would become central to her artistic methodology and finds their way into her larger body of artistic work.

As Akeema-Zane began to aspire a career as an artist, her scholarship increasingly became a foundational element of her creative practice. As a literary scholar, she sought to bridge her lived experience as a Caribbean descendant and Harlem native with her academic training in Caribbean history, postcolonial thought, and Black feminist analysis. The archive, pedagogy, and critical writing emerged not as parallel pursuits, but as interconnected materials through which she could interrogate memory, power, and cultural inheritance.

Her grounding in Africana Studies at Eugene Lang College further solidified this convergence. Through coursework including Research Methods, African American Religion, Urbanization of the Black World, How Does Race Define American Music, and Hip-Hop Pedagogy, Parton developed a rigorous theoretical and socio-historical framework that informed both her pedagogical and artistic approaches. In Hip-Hop Pedagogy, taught by Dr. Kersha Smith, she collaborated with peers to design an interdisciplinary six-week curriculum for sixth-grade writing and science classrooms, employing hip-hop as a pedagogical framework and methodological strategy. The project emphasized integrated curriculum design, collective knowledge-building, and culturally responsive teaching—approaches that would later reappear across her work in education, archives, and cultural institutions.