Mira backdrop Wall SurferBrown Girl Surf , C0-Director

Mira Manickam is a multmedia artist, author, and environmental educator.  She was raised in New Jersey, educated at Brown and Yale, and today makes her home in the Bay Area of northern California. Through her music, ninja-warrior-in-training expertise, and community activism, Mira has innovated urban environmental work and, threading through those efforts, shown new ways of  building a women of color presence in the ocean.   Recently she was hired to run Brown Girl Surf — Oakland.  This important project combines the needs and mission of the City of Oakland Recreation Division with that of the activist organization, BrownGirlSurf, which, with Farhana Huq, Mira helped to found.  Its purpose: to bring Oakland residents, especially women and girls, closer to ocean activities, including surfing.

Surfer Grrrls Brazil

Surfer Grrrls Brazil! is a project Mira undertook in 2012-2014.  It aim was to inspire women and girls to boldly invent their own ways of being in the world. To do that she documented the experience of surfing along the Brazilian coast through music and blog posts, and from her travels as a solo woman, she brought inspiration and insight back to the Bay Area local surf worlds. Check out this amazing Americas

collaborative sound/rhythm piece filmed between Bahia and Ocean Beach, San Francisco:  “This World is Yours/Time to Play.”  It blends hip hop and movement with the street music and rich histories of Pelhourinho, Bahia, Saldavor. Featuring Jazz Vassar, doing capoeira-inspired dance, with also Jenny O’Connell (vocals). Her many talents are on offer in her original music as well as in her work as an athlete and ninja-warrior-in-training.

Surfer Grrrls Brazil!Mira is an example to others of the goal of the Surfer Grrrls Brazil venture:  Mira is s well as in her writingsblending hip hopwriting,  and She is a former fellow at the Headlands Institute (Sausalito, California), where she was also involved  where surfing and and to raise the profile of women of color in the ocean.education and in tihas written about Thailand,

Surfer Grrrls Brazil!

Multimedia Artist, Author, Environmental Educator.

Urban Tree Ninjas  bringing “jungle back to the block on the streets of San Francisco” with Andre Pfening