Kanyinsola Anifowoshe is grateful to be serving as Program Manager for Freedom to Grow. Grounded in her experience as a Nigerian-American immigrant, the daughter of an organizer, and her roots in youth-led intersectional feminist and liberatory organizing, Kanyinsola is devoted to collectively envisioning and realizing transformative movements for justice and liberation through public art, curatorial practice, and research.

Kanyinsola’s past experience includes roles at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Monument Lab Foundation, and the Justice Arts Coalition, where she has engaged in curatorial, programming, and research projects at the intersection of artistic practice and transformative social change. 

She recently completed her Bachelor of Arts in American Studies and Human Rights Studies at Yale, where her thesis explored how Solitary Gardens constructs life-giving ecological relations through which we can think, feel, and dream freedom. While at Yale, she was a leader with the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, where she helped spearhead a post-COVID-19 direct service strategy that collaboratively built re-entry support resources in New Haven. 

After graduating, she completed a research fellowship in Santiago, Chile, studying the role of performance and visual culture in transmitting historical memory of state violence. While in Santiago, she had the honor of serving as a research assistant at the Casa Memoria José Domingo Cañas, working on recovering cultural memory of those forcibly disappeared during the Chilean dictatorship. Most recently, she has supported housing attorneys at Mobilization for Justice in New York City. 

Kanyinsola returns to New Orleans after interning at Solitary Gardens in the summer of 2023, where she witnessed how persistently solitary gardeners tend to the possibility of life under seemingly impossible conditions. Their example continues to inspire her, and she is deeply grateful to be a part of Freedom to Grow’s vital work.