As a Nigerian woman who was born in New York and raised in London, Catherine Labiran is passionate about advancing social justice through poetry, advocacy, research, and healing-centered modalities. As the Founder of Catherine Bisola Labiran Consulting, she supports clients by providing a spectrum of services including writing, research, evaluation, facilitation, strategic planning, and (somatic) coaching. She believes that art and liberation are inseparable and interdependent, and that the process of moving towards liberatory futures requires our most radical, creative, and expansive imaginations. Consequently, she enjoys designing spaces and products that move us from simply thinking and talking about justice to embodying it.

Poetry: Catherine strives to infuse her diverse cultural experiences into exhilarating bodies of work enabling them to live lives of their own. She was selected as a winner of SLAMbassadors UK 2010, a winner of 30 Nigeria House, and was conferred the honour of writing the official Olympic Poem for London 2012 as one of London’s “12 Poets for 2012”. In the past, she has been the poet in residence for Bang Said The Gun and Larmer Tree Festival. Her poetry has been translated into several languages for publications across the globe. She was the buddy poet for Wole Soyinka and TJ Dema during Poetry Parnassus and thousands of her poems were dropped by helicopter over Jubilee Gardens during this same event. Catherine is featured in the National Association for the Teaching of English’s ‘SLAM’ DVD that was sent to every high school in the United Kingdom. Her poems have not only been studied at high school level but also at university level.  She has performed in venues such as The House of Commons, The Royal Festival Hall, The Queen Elizabeth Hall, to name but a few. She has performed across Europe, Africa and America. Catherine’s first book entitled ‘Ayisat’ was launched in Cape Town, South Africa in November 2013. Catherine is currently working on new poetry and has been honing her craft in workshops with Cave Canem in NYC.

Social justice/human rights: Catherine has worked for a number of human rights organizations including the US Human Rights Network where she helped cultivate grassroots organizing power by supporting USHRN’s members and linking their work to events and activities happening at the United Nations. At USHRN, Catherine’s area of focus was the UN’s international Decade for People of African Descent where she coordinated a Working Group of individuals who were striving to help actualize the Decade’s goal of achieving recognition, justice and development for people of African descent by 2024. She also organized civil society consultations for The UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, The UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, The UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking and the UN Special Rapporteur on Poverty. In 2019, Catherine was selected as a Fellow for People of African Descent by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights. In 2020, she was named as one of the Most Influential People of African Descent by MIPAD 100. As the Gender Justice Program Coordinator at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Catherine led BAJI’s gender-related research and advocacy initiatives. Catherine also served in the Healthy Equity & Access under the Law (HEAL) Act Coalition, which worked to expand access to healthcare for immigrant women and families. Additionally, Catherine represented BAJI on the advisory committee for National Bail Out — a collective striving to end pretrial detention and, ultimately, incarceration. Furthermore, she served on the planning committee for United We Rise — a collective working to end the HIV epidemic in Black communities. At The Praxis Project, Catherine designed trainings, workshops and learning circles for grassroots base-building organizations, public health institutions and local government. She has been invited to speak at a number of institutions including Columbia University, Yale University and Malmo University in Sweden. In 2021, she was invited to give a keynote speech at the UN General Assembly.

Consulting: She is passionate about supporting organizations and individuals in creating and evaluating programs, trainings, workshops and curriculums. As a storyteller, she is interested in supporting clients in unearthing the most authentic story that they would like to tell and situating and connecting their individual/organizational story with liberatory movements and frameworks. Through her work with Social Insights Research, she has supported evaluation projects with Black Feminist Future, the Liberatory Leadership project, Center for Third World Organizing, Community Change’s Women’s Fellowship, and me too. International. Through her consultancy, Catherine Bisola Labiran Consulting LLC, she has worked with a number of organizations including Freedom for Immigrants, Michigan Justice Fund, and The Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund.

Degrees/certifications/honors: Catherine holds a BA in Psychology from Emory University, an MA in African Studies from Yale University, a certification in Data Science: R Basics from HarvardX (an online learning initiative of Harvard University), a certification in Somatic Attachment Therapy from The Embody Lab, a certification in Embodied Conflict Resolution from The Embody Lab, and has completed module one in Somatic Sex Education from the Institute of Somatic Sex Education. In 2022, The Boris Henson Foundation selected Catherine as a finalist for their Joy Award for Black mental health professionals. In 2023, Catherine was selected as a participant in The Conflict Transformation Fund's Healing Justice Co-Creation Lab for healing justice practitioners.