Shante’ Zenith

MA, MFA, MHC*

currently pursuing PHD

Creative Cosmology Consultant

Systemic Constellations Facilitator

Earth Poet Edge Weaver

Director, Writer, Performer, Dramaturg

*Pending completion of certification

I support storytellers of stage and screen in connecting to the unseen sources of their creative cosmology to widen possibilities for collective imagination.

As a Consultant, Coordinator, and Collaborator: I am catalyzing a new form of Creative Development through cosmology, constellations, somatics, animist ritual, and ancestral healing to bring artists into the systemic change conversations that are necessary for collective transformation.

In my current PhD research in Human Development at Fielding Graduate University, I’m gathering artists’ stories of mystery and transformation within their creative process.

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.

I'm certified as a facilitator through a three year facilitation training from the Minnesota Center of Systemic Constellations.

Currently in training with the Association of Mental Health Coordinators, I can also be hired by writers rooms, film and television sets, and theatre projects to support regenerative wellbeing culture and emotional integration throughout creative process.

I have a currently dormant substack soon to be revived with new creations.

I grew up inside of stories.

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 as I was navigating autistic burnout 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.

Recently, while beginning a PhD program in Human Development focused on the relationship between imagination and the imaginal, I've been stepping into a process of reclaiming my identity as a director and theatre creator while being curious about how I can weave my existing work in Ritual Facilitation into collaborative creative projects.

I'm also growing my practice as a Relational Field Consultant in a role which is like a shamanic "outside eye" for directors and artistic leaders who want to explore the ways in which their creative projects are connected to ecological and ancestral forces.

This whole process of reclaiming is bringing me back to my original dreams around creations that really blur the edge between ritual and performance, facilitation and directing, storytelling and systems sensing, where expressive embodiment with community witness can also become a form of research.

Where do the old gods go

when their stories have been forgotten?

They go to the places where the land is still being fed.

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.

I have recently moved to Southern California, where I am weaving a new relationship with the Pacific Ocean, Ballona Creek, the Los Angeles River, eucalyptus, fig, kumquat, and avocado trees, lizards, coyotes, and many other beings.