Nikila Badua

MamaWisdom1 represents the multimedia art of Nikila Badua.

Born on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, Nikila is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist, performer, and organizer dedicated to creating positive social transformation through arts and cultural ecology for the past 25 years. With mixed Pacific Islander, First Nations, and European lineages, to the raw street smarts of the Bay Area’s inner cities, her background has played a significant role within shaping her path into, what she calls, a “Cultural Community Artist”. Through a seven year journey of homeschooling her son as a single mother and touring performance artist, as well as taking on the role as Co-Director and Program Director for that Native Hawaiian Youth Arts organization 808 Urban in 2010, Nikila began exploring arts and Indigenous ecology-based learning as a long-term solution toward educational reform. Through the Cultural Community Arts for Educational Reform Initiative, Nikila has been working on comprehensive curricula that places “culture”, “community”, and the “arts” as foundational to youth development. With a core focus on cultural celebration and competency, community-building and ecology, and the arts for critical thinking, personal expression, and emotional development, the initiative places people over profit by instilling solid value systems within our youth as imperative to the future of humanity’s collective liberation.