Who I Am
I am a Maine-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, singer, movement maker, cultural organizer, and founder of Keita’s Pathways. My creative practice, which I call Soul Mapping, has been shaped by a lifetime of making across disciplines and by more than three decades of work in community leadership, social justice, social work, somatic practice, and healing.

Born in New York City and formed by the experimental energy of Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I came of age amid dance, music, performance art, and artist-created worlds. After moving to Maine in 1995 with my sons, I built a life of service and cultural work while continuing to create. I organized community programs, wrote for the Portland Press Herald, produced and hosted the Mama Afrika Show on WMPG, sang with reggae and acoustic musicians, taught, facilitated, and worked alongside families and communities navigating poverty, displacement, racism, violence, and adversity.

My visual language now brings together those many currents. I work with acrylic paint, sea glass, shells, gemstones, weathered wood, jewelry, pottery, natural materials, and found or repurposed objects. Water, ancestry, memory, Spirit, feminine power, migration, beauty, and return move through the work. I do not separate the artist I am today from the woman who organized, mothered, studied, taught, listened, witnessed, healed, danced, and began again. Those experiences are the ground from which the work rises.


Professional Identity Statement
Keita Annie Whitten is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice transforms lived experience, ancestral memory, embodied knowing, and gathered materials into richly layered works of remembrance and renewal. Her method, Soul Mapping, allows materials, intuition, Spirit, and felt experience to guide the making before meaning is fully known. Across visual art, assemblage, sculpture, writing, sound, movement, and sanctuary-building, she creates spaces in which what has been weathered, broken, carried, or forgotten can become visible without erasing its history.

Keita is the daughter of poet Nyja (Florence) Attenborough and pioneering abstract painter Jack Whitten (1939–2018). While deeply aware of this artistic lineage, she developed her own practice independently, outside of her father’s studio and without traditional art-school training. Her creative language grew instead through motherhood, performance, writing, music, movement, cultural exploration, spiritual inquiry, and a lifelong relationship with making.
 
Her earlier career as a social worker, trauma therapist, educator, racial-equity practitioner, organizer, and somatic facilitator remains an essential foundation—not as her current professional identity, but as a body of knowledge about people, systems, survival, dignity, and transformation. Through Keita’s Pathways, she is extending this life’s work into a restorative arts sanctuary in Maine for elder multicultural, Aboriginal, Indigenous, and mixed-race women artists to create, rest, teach, belong, and be honored in life.

Read Full Biographical Work History & Professional Profile Here