Ayo Ngozi

Ayo Ngozi (she/her), Co-Director of the Braiding Seeds Fellowship, is a community herbalist, farmer and artist. Descended from sharecropping farmers and herbalists, and degreed in Africana studies and clinical herbalism, Ayo’s work exists at the intersection of Black agrarianism, ancestral technologies and healing justice. For over a decade, she has been an instructor and advisor to herbal schools and programs, including The People’s Medicine School, Wild Ginger Herbal Center, Seed Soil + Spirit School, the Gullah Geechee Herbal Gathering, and the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. 

As a writer, artist and contributor to publications and podcasts, Ayo’s work has been featured in the Journal of the American Herbalist Guild, Yes! magazine, Rooted Magazine and KPFA’s The Herbal Highway. She has also been featured in Lucretia Vandyke’s African-American Herbalism (2022) and Leah Penniman’s Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (2023).

A 2023-24 recipient of both the Braiding Seeds Fellowship and the Center for Cultural Power’s Narrative Design Lab fellowship, Ayo is also the founder of Brickyard Gardens, community-based spaces for herbal and farming education, on unceded Guale land in Savannah, GA.