Originally from The Gambia, Diana is a contemporary visual artist and farmer.

Diana’s maternal grandmother was a vegetable farmer and market woman, selling traditionally crafted goat’s milk yogurt, beautiful pyramids of deeply flavorful, heirloom tomatoes she’d cook down into bright, naturally zestful tomato paste for market and locally grown peanuts and peanut butter her community would use to prepare one of our most beloved national dishes, domoda.

Always drawn to the ways in which nature’s presence or absence shapes us, Diana became ever more curious about the inextricable link between food and ecology after moving to rural, upstate NY. Thousands of miles from her homeland, she felt compelled to connect with her grandmother’s wisdom by placing her hands in the soil to touch the roots of her knowing and the knowing within us all. ritual and meditation that also inform her art practice.

After witnessing profound climate change and other crises give rise to the mass movement of Wolof people, a tribe indigenous to the Senegambia region and southern Mauritania, she began working with Wolof-speaking refugees as a translator and facilitator in their pursuit for legal status and/or asylum in New York. Thus, Holy Forest Farm (HFF) has evolved to become more than an environment where we grow food in partnership with the natural world. It is a sanctuary outside of the industrial food system for those seeking a connection to land—one that fosters resilience, restores dignity and promotes food sovereignty amongst diasporic communities of BIPOC people, empowering individuals to become stewards of their own futures.