Black Woman Breathing is a meditative sound film that investigates how the hyper-surveillance of Black existence disrupts our most basic life force: the breath. Created as the final project for the Stanford course “Long Live our 4 Billion Old Mother: Black Feminist Praxis, Indigenous Resistance, Queer Possibility,” the piece centers on liberatory practice, embodied reflection, and political imagination. What begins as a quiet classroom ritual—breathing to ground oneself—unfolds into a deeply personal, sonic inquiry: How does the regulation of breath mirror broader structures of control? And what does it mean to reclaim it?

The film moves between spoken word, soundscape, and visual fragments—footage of campus walks, birdsong, trees, and insects—to reflect the slow, sacred labor of becoming well. Influenced by Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters and Joy Harjo’s ceremonial music, the project treats breath as a political act and a way of knowing that connects the body to planetary life.

The piece culminates in a poetic reimagining of selfhood, rooted in collective breath and the radical presence of the overlooked. Through sound, voice, and rhythm, Black Woman Breathing traces the micro-resurrections that take place each time we choose to breathe—intentionally, freely, and in relation.