—Shante’ Zenith*
I am here to weave the dreaming into life, tending the diaphanous veil between creativity and the unseen.
Where do the old gods go when their stories have been forgotten?
They go to the place where the land is still being fed.
The Lands that Dreamed Me
* yes, my first name really does end with an apostrophe… my mother didn’t know how to type an accent mark on the old green imac that I learned to type on as a homeschooled millenial and so taught me to type an apostrophe instead, and it stuck that way. 
Birth, Ancestry, and Creature Kin
I was born on the night of a crescent moon during a lightening storm in a cabin by the ocean in Maui, Hawai‘i, to two hippy parents who briefly converged after meeting at an improv gathering so that I could come into the world. I have the sense it was not just the humans who were responsible for my conception on that trickster island, but that a whole confluence of spirit beings were also a part of my co-creation.
My mother returned with me to Minnesota when I was a baby, and I have grown up here in this place of reflective waters, on the ancestral homelands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe people, near a nexus of sacred sites called Bdote. As a descendant of the settler-colonists who caused harm to this land and its original peoples, I am learning to slow down and listen into direct relationship with the nature spirits and beings of this place.
I am in ongoing relationship with the complexities of my lineage of ancestors from the British Isles, Germany, Sweden, and the Eastern European Jewish Diaspora, while also reconnecting with my deep time ancestors from pre-colonial Europe and remembering the felt sense of my belonging to people who originally knew relational practices for nourishing earth and culture.
I was always tuned towards animism, even before I had the words for it, and in the last few years I have also been able to re-frame my life through the newly added context of AuDHD (autism + adhd), which I experience as a heightened sensitivity towards the aliveness of all beings and the relational webbing that connects us.
My wisest and most steady kin have always been the nature beings who surround me. More-than-human allies who have guided me through formative life thresholds and companioned me through the sweetness of my daily reality include: Grandmother Cottonwood, Painted Turtles, Maitake Mushroom, the Mississippi, Minnesota, St. Croix, and Vermillion Rivers, and Masheah the dog creature beloved of my heart.
Recent Interviews and Readings
I grew up inside of stories.
Words
From the age of five years old, I was fascinated with theatre and the tangible resonance that occurs when audience and actor synchronize perception.
As a precocious homeschool student, I began interning at a professional Lecoq-based theatre company when I was 14, and spent 10 years studying creative process through apprenticeship in acting, directing, dramaturgy, and creative writing.
From the very beginning, theatre creation has been my place of meaning where I touched a kind of vitality and erotic expression that has been missing from colonial culture.
Theatre was the first place I started sensing into relational field consciousness—the energetic tissue that creates all bodies and exists inside, between, and within them.
My experiences in theatre planted the seeds for my life-long curiosity around how imaginal architecture creates culture.
In my early twenties, my relationship with the theatre industry became complicated and I ended up shifting my focus away from theatre creation as my primary art form, and beginning to research the deeper ritual roots that I sensed theatre emerging from.
Words
My two masters degrees at Goddard College focused on exploring ecology, grief rituals, earth connection, nervous system science and embodiment, transcontextual mutual learning and Warm Data, metaphor landscapes and poetics, and systemic constellations.
The research I completed for my MA culminated in a thesis project exploring how perception can limit our ability to feel love as the primordial foundation of reality.
My graduate research focused on the paradox of absence/presence as the root of our embodied experience, and the relational tissuing process from mediated to direct sourcing of erotic life force that creates a sense of energetic center.
My long-term vision is to connect people in Hollywood and high level creative industries with local projects and actually sinking down the income that comes from fantasy back into relationship with earth.