About Us
Established in 2018, the WaWaWa Diaspora Centre is an arts and cultural heritage organization based in Brooklyn, New York that creates programs and media to nurture and support the Black diaspora to actively heal historic and systemic wounds and trauma related to, and derived from the TransAtlantic Slave Trade.
WaWaWa focuses on collaboration and collective exploration through active, participatory experiences. Our programs and media appear in many different locations throughout the African diaspora, taking many different forms. Our public presentations are low-cost or free, to offer access to the widest audience.
Our Mission
Wa means “come” in Fon and Yoruba, two West African languages, and WaWaWa serves as a bridge facilitating the “coming together” of many people across many waters. Despite varied ancestral routes that have created identities of mixed ethnicities and loyalties, Black people remain rooted to Africa – visible in music, fashion, food, language, spiritual practices, family dynamics, and communal ways of being.
The mission of the WaWaWa Diaspora Centre is to build a dynamic exchange between intergenerational artists/visionaries, educators/healers, historians/students of the African diaspora to dispel biases, develop new modes of thinking and doing, while creating lasting reconciliatory practices and solutions. We use the arts, historical inquiry and open dialogue/exchanges to educate and sensitize members of the global Black diaspora to the real conditions and experiences of others.
Our History
The WaWaWa Diaspora Centre was a project started in 2016 by Régine Romain, a Haitian-American artist, educator and visual anthropologist. From 2016 - 2018, Régine lived in Benin, West Africa, conducting research, teaching, and completing her mixed-media project. Her family, friends and friends of friends asked if she would facilitate tours, so she did. Artists, teachers, professors, entrepreneurs, journalists, and spiritual initiates all came to experience West Africa through WaWaWa’s intergenerational arts, education, and exchange programs. From this work fostered a strong desire to continue advancing cultural innovation, racial harmony and healing for the black descendants of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
WaWaWa Diaspora Centre served as the producer of one student film “The Clotilde: A Poetic Journey” and two short narrative award-winning documentary films “Brooklyn to Benin: A Vodou Pilgrimage” and “African Odyssey: Ancestral Memories.” These WaWaWa produced films invite students, educators and community members to explore issues of representation, race, power and privilege, while bringing into sharp focus the importance of identity, culture and history in the telling of Black stories.
WaWaWa Diaspora Centre was incorporated as a 501c3 not-for-profit in the state of New York in 2018. The organizational network grew through film screenings, community dialogues, the publication of “Nou Pap Bliye: A Haitian Coloring Book”, conferences, book discussions, and collaborating with other community based organizations.