About Ima Aura

My name is Ima Aura. I am a psychotherapist, anthropologist, artist researcher and community practitioner working across embodiment, ancestry, neurodivergence, Black Atlantic memory, ritual, archive and repair.

My work moves between therapeutic practice, artist research, film, writing, fieldwork and community spaces. Across these forms, I am interested in how histories live in the body, how memory moves through families and landscapes, and what becomes possible when we create spaces for reflection, return and transformation.

I completed my MA in Medical Anthropology and Mental Health at SOAS, where my research explored museum restitution activism, community healing, ancestral remains, institutional harm and decolonial praxis. This research continues through Atlantic Calibration, my descendant led artist research practice and living archive moving through Britain, Barbados and Nigeria.

Anti-disciplinary Practice

My work does not sit neatly inside one discipline.

It moves through psychotherapy, anthropology, artist research, archive, ritual, film, writing, embodiment and community practice. I am not trying to stitch these fields together so they become acceptable to institutions. I am following the ways knowledge actually moves.

For me, anti-disciplinary practice is a refusal of the idea that knowledge only becomes valid when it is held inside professional, academic or institutional containers.

It makes room for the body, the dream, the land, the archive, the ancestor, the nervous system, the image, the community and the more than human world to be taken seriously as sites of knowledge.

Research, Repair and Community Practice

My research and community work sit at the meeting point of mental health, ancestry, cultural memory, museum restitution, Black Atlantic worlds and embodied repair.

I am interested in how people and communities carry histories that are often ignored, fragmented, pathologised or held inside institutions. My work asks what forms of care, witnessing, creativity and repair become possible when those histories are approached with more honesty and depth.

Whether through therapy, film, writing, fieldwork, ritual or community practice, my work is concerned with how we return to ourselves, each other, our bodies, our histories and our ways of knowing.