What are you looking for?
The author of My Grandmother's Hands brings IMEN to the screen and joins our community in a new way: as a student.
Some stories at CIIS come full circle. This one keeps widening.
Resmaa Menakem has long been a part of how the CIIS community learns to heal. His book My Grandmother's Hands is required reading across our somatic psychology and trauma-informed curriculum. He has joined us in conversation, spoken to our students, and received an honorary doctorate from CIIS. This fall, he joined us in a new way: as a student in the online Ph.D. in Transformative Studies.
Resmaa’s work doesn’t stay in one lane. He is a licensed clinical social worker who specializes in racialized trauma, communal healing, and cultural first aid. He created Cultural Somatics, an approach that uses the body and resilience as mechanisms for growth. He calls his work on embodied healing Somatic Abolitionism.
Now, with IMEN and Three Black Men, he is carrying that healing work to new audiences through storytelling.
IMEN is a timely television series that explores power, identity, and inheritance in a science-fiction setting. The show follows Dean Vincent, a man forced into a covert biological transfer tied to Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cells, known as HeLa cells. A brilliant young recruit, a volatile former partner, and a billionaire intent on control pull him into a conflict over loyalty, ambition, and survival.
Resmaa co-created IMEN with Vincent Ventresca and Andre Hardy, serving as executive producer and co-writer. The project began with a question from Ventresca: did Resmaa want to remake Invisible Man? Resmaa had a different idea. “Let’s talk about the invisibility of the Black body,” he says, “from the point of view of cells, embodiment, and extraction.”
The result is science fiction grounded in Black people's lived experiences. “The production of IMEN touches on Blackness, fugitivity, and unpermissioness,” Resmaa says. At its core, the series is a reckoning with the interlocking forces of white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, built on the extraction, extermination, and extinction of Black and Indigenous bodies.
The pilot episode is complete. Resmaa is currently touring to share the project and raise resources to film the remaining eight episodes of the first season.
IMEN isn’t his only new work on screen. Resmaa also appears in Three Black Men, a feature documentary from the Center for Healing and Liberation. He travels with professor and author Bayo Akomolafe, CIIS’ 2023 Commencement speaker, and with healer and author Orland Bishop. Together, they retrace the transatlantic slave route in reverse, from Los Angeles to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and on to Accra, Ghana. The film has received acclaim at international film festivals and is now beginning a tour in the U.S. and abroad.
Rachel Bryant, Vice President, Division of Community Engagement and Belonging, first met Resmaa on the page. My Grandmother's Hands spoke to her lived experience and to the heart of the communities she serves. "It's been a gift to have that connection grow into a friendship," says Rachel. In 2023, she interviewed Resmaa for CIIS Public Programs about his book The Quaking of America. She remembers it as "a conversation that shook me and changed me." Then in 2024, Resmaa stood before our graduating class to deliver the commencement address. CIIS awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work in social justice and somatic healing.
This fall, Rachel invited him to return to CIIS as a student, specifically in the online Ph.D. in Transformative Studies, which is designed to make room for Resmaa’s unique kind of work. Transdisciplinary research is grounded in systems and complexity thinking. It is an innovative, individualized, cohort-based, transdisciplinary degree that frames inquiry as a creative process.
Other schools had invited him in. Resmaa chose CIIS.
Elsewhere, he says, "the brutality would be unchecked. I would be fighting dragons by myself." Here, he found something different. "There is no other place on the planet that would have held me, taken care of me, and looked out for me, not just as an academician, but as a person."
"His long relationship with CIIS as a teacher, author, commencement speaker, honorary doctorate recipient, and now student" makes this "an even more meaningful story for our community," says Dr. Fernando Ona, Resmaa's chair. He sees in Resmaa's path "the kind of public-facing, transdisciplinary work that CIIS seeks to cultivate."
“When Resmaa applied to the program, I kindly commented to him that he may be the first CIIS student who will have to study their own work as part of the degree,” Dr. Jeanine Canty, a faculty member, recalls. She was a little concerned at the level of attention he would receive from other students and the larger community and how he might fit in. “Resmaa has joined the community in such humbling ways, truly stepping in as a peer, navigating the challenges of being a doctoral student and equally so getting excited by the curriculum and the larger learning community. He is delightfully engaged,” she says.
Join a community of passionate scholars exploring innovative ways to make a difference in the world through our online Ph.D. program.
Associate Professor Doug Ronning graduated from CIIS' Drama Therapy program in 2006. Now he teaches in it — with monsters, role play games, and embodied play.
An endowed Drama Therapy scholarship honors a life of creativity, compassion, and service.
After 15 years in corporate diversity work, Indigo ’26, ’27 pursues both a B.A. and M.A. at CIIS while discovering what it means to show up authentically in community.
