Raised in Los Angeles, California, Amani, now residing in Brooklyn, New York has been a prevalent student of the arts and academies. Earning her Bachelor degree presently at Tisch School of the Arts in New York University, Rikki majors in Performance Studies, a multidisciplinary, intersectional thought space and medium of research, archival and creativity. Rikki’s history; a liberal arts k-12 education and upbringing in the urban environment of Inglewood, California pushed her to protest in the 2020 Black uprising in response to police brutality, where she was arrested for peacefully protesting and later propelled into Political Science – her introduction to college. Amani later transferred to Pratt Institute to study filmmaking with a focus on documentary and experimental film using much of her footage from the 2020 uprising. Once finding her need to intertwine Radical Black Thought, Black Feminist Theory, Dance Studies, Filmmaking, Archival and more she found herself in the Performance Studies department of NYU. Presently Rikki is in her senior year continuing to write at length about Choreo-Policing in regard to protests (Dance/Performance Studies), Black-Palestinian Solidarity, Decolonization of the Arts and topics of other social cultural importance from the Black American perspective.

Why PS @ NYU?

I am passionate about the person and care deeply for expression.