Janae’ “Jaee” Sumter (they/them) is a New Orleans native with a rich background and calling in Visual Art, Arts Education, Community Building, Event Planning, Life Coaching, Plant work, Energy Healing, and Creative Entrepreneurship.​

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As a solution builder, Jaee's professional artistic and educational work intertwines their mission as an artist and educator, who centers on ending systemic educational gaps and poverty while creating accessible learning environments for youth and adults to feel safe in expressing themselves creatively. Jaee integrates self-inquiry learning and solution building through expression, storytelling, and creative thinking, planting and nurturing seeds towards social change.

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As a New Orleans native, Jaee has been in the arts (dance, music, art) since childhood and deepened as a teen and evolved as an adult.  Jaee has been creating in various disciplines and sharing stories through their work since high school. Creatively expressing themselves empowered their voice and freedom of expression. The arts and community, holistically, helped them navigate their challenging life experiences of grief, communal displacement, violence, and abuse, and guide their vision and action.

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Jaee has been developing community arts, healing, and wellness projects and programs for the last eleven years, since their first year in undergraduate school, when Jaee shared their survivor story. The sharing of their story guided them in offering a safe, healing, and creative space for other survivors to share. Jaee has been teaching for seven years, with four years in arts education administration.

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​Jaee received their Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from Spelman College in Atlanta, GA,  and Master of Arts in Integrated Practices from Pratt Institute, concentrating on Community Art and Healing Justice. Their multidisciplinary ancestral work is guided intentionally through storytelling, archiving, teaching, program development, and creative healing approaches as an educational tool for community empowerment, socio-emotional understanding, identity awareness, ancestral connection, liberation, and intergenerational healing with and for under-resourced communities.

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These approaches actualize through visual assemblages, movement, herbal medicine, community art activations, arts integration education, ancestral public altars, ritual practice, coaching, creative-based community fundraising, and trauma release work as a pathway for addressing the complexity of systemic oppression. Jaee is the owner of Sweet Herbal Honey Apothecary LLC and Director of our  Asé O: Descendants of Roots & Legacy Community Arts and Wellness Education Program.

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Fun Fact:

Jaee loves working with people, being in nature, building with community, painting, growing herbs and food, and learning about other cultures. Jaee has traveled to five countries and at least 17 cities, living and teaching as an art teacher and artist in China, California, Georgia, New York, and Mexico. Their work has been published in various magazines and newspapers, including the 2019 National Geographic Women’s edition and Sugarcane Magazine.