My whole world changed when I encountered the Black Madonna.
Though I was a professor at Duke University and presented a stoically-confident persona to the world, internally I struggled with deep insecurities about my worth, the validity of my embodied experience as a Black person and a woman, my body, my ability, and more.
In 2016, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, I went searching for a spiritual icon that could relate to my experience as a Black person and a woman, and affirm that my body, life and story do in fact matter.
It didn't take long for me to encounter the Black Madonna — an interfaith, ancient, uncommon, dark-skinned version of the Virgin Mary who has been venerated across religions, eras, and geographic locations. Within seconds of viewing photos of Black Madonnas, my gut shifted from terror to hope.
Before I even read a word about the Black Madonna, my soul immediately recognized that these photos and drawings of ancient Black Madonnas declared a truth about my own sacredness and gave birth to a new understanding of the divine.
In late 2018, I embarked on a 400-mile walking pilgrimage across central France to visit 18 Black Madonnas in tiny mountain villages. Each encounter with each Black Madonna healed a part of me -- from embracing my imperfection to loving my body to standing in my truth.I detailed my transformational journey in my book God Is a Black Woman (HarperCollins).
Now I’m a troubadour of the Black Madonna and I guide people away from white patriarchal conditioning and into deeper communion with the Great Mother.
Christena Cleveland, Ph.D. is a social psychologist, public theologian, author, and activist. She is the founder and director of the Center for Justice + Renewal which supports a more equitable world by nurturing skillful justice advocacy and the depth to act on it.
A weaver at heart, Dr. Cleveland integrates psychology, theology, storytelling, and art to help justice seekers sharpen their understanding of the social realities that maintain injustice while also stimulating the soul’s enormous capacity to resist and transform those realities.
Dr. Cleveland holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of California Santa Barbara, a B.A. from Dartmouth College where she double majored in Sociology and Psychological and Brain Sciences, as well as an honorary doctorate from the Virginia Theological Seminary. An award-winning researcher and author, Christena is a Ford Foundation Fellow who has held faculty positions at several institutions of higher education — most recently at Duke University’s Divinity School, where she was the first African-American and first female director of the Duke Center for Reconciliation, and also led a research team investigating self-compassion as a buffer to racial stress. In 2022, she published her second full-length book, God is a Black Woman (HarperCollins), which details her 400-mile walking pilgrimage across central France in search of ancient Black Madonna statues, and examines the relationship among race, gender, and cultural perceptions of the Divine. Her work has been featured in a number of major media outlets including the History Channel, PBS, Essence Magazine, the Washington Post, NPR, and BBC Radio.
Though Dr. Cleveland loves scholarly inquiry, she is also an avid student of embodied wisdom. She recently completed the Art & Social Change intensive somatic training for millennial leaders, and is currently deepening her mind-body-spirit integration in a year-long embodied leadership cohort for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
A bona fide tea snob, lover of Black art, and Ólafur Arnalds superfan — Christena makes her home in Minneapolis.