NICOLE ANGELA PEARSON is a Bronx born, Anchorage, Alaska raised activist, writer, teacher, and entrepreneur who in 2005 moved to Spain to study flamenco dance. Nicole studied African American history at Howard University with a focus on Black women and Black liberation movements. In 2015 she started a wine and travel business, Nicole Angela Travel and Taste, where she gives workshops, tours and tastings exploring Spanish history through wine.
A lifelong activist Nicole´s passion for justice was ignited by the anti-apartheid movement and and Latin American liberation struggles. In high school she started working with the solidarity group CISPES, Communities in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. At university Nicole was heavily involved in organizing students and youth in the DC area against the first Persian Gulf War. From there she worked as a lobbyist for USSA, United States Students Association and NARAL. Post university she trained as a community organizer in Oakland with the Center for Third World Organizing and went on to work on anti-lead, police harassment, and voting campaigns in Denver and Portland. In Seattle, Nicole worked with LELO a multiracial/generational community based labor group, helped form a youth of color lead organizing collective as well as organized student and youth for the WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle in 1999. As a result of that organizing she was subsequently arrested and became a named plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit against the City of Seattle and the Seattle Police Department. After years of on the ground activism, Nicole shifted focus to work with YES! Magazine in 2001 organizing multigenerational conferences of activists from various political movements. In this position she met some of the most influential activists from the environmental and US civil rights movements such as Vandana Shiva, Joanna Macy, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons and Vincent Harding.
Nicole currently lives in Berlin. While writing her first book, a literary memoir, she is finding creative new ways to use theater as a tool for decolonization. For Decolonize Berlin, she wrote a theatrical intervention called Looking for Amo to help people connect to African enslavement's enduring legacy of harm. Nicole is also working with the Amo Initiative at Humbolt University to create decolonial spaces and practices, and the play Nicole wrote, "hand, breast, heart", about intergenerational memory and healing, for the Nebunele Theatre company will be performed in 2023. Nebunele seeks to dismantle the patriarchy by nurturing artists from historically excluded communities.
Read her essays on Medium:
White Supremacy Is A White Problem
