ABOUT
Dr. Valorie Thomas is an experienced keynote speaker, writer, curator, social justice advocate, animal advocate, and HERD Institute (EFL l) certified equine assisted personal development facilitator.
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Dr. Valorie works with organizations, professionals, artists, students, teachers, academics, cultural workers, and individuals.
Dr. Valorie considers understanding of neurodivergence, decolonial orientations, and reclaiming ancestral knowledge, as crucial to this supportive work. As a meditator, yoga practitioner (bhakti, hatha), and energy worker for over twenty-five years, Dr. Thomas guides clients toward sovereignty, insight, and compassionate solutions.
ABOUT MY EFL WORK WITH HORSES
As a certified Equine Facilitated Learning and energy practitioner, Dr. Valorie guides clients toward getting to know themselves better by interacting safely in partnership with horses on the ground, or virtually. These interactions offer opportunities for discovery, contemplation, and play. Horses assist humans by offering their presence and instinctive responses, supporting experiences of somatic resilience, personal and group trust, boundaries, emotional states, and nervous system co-regulation and self-regulation. Horses are sentient beings whose survival depends on their attunement to the herd and the environment. The horse's ability to regulate their nervous system supports and regulates humans.
Contact me for a free 15 -30 min. introductory consultation.
Background
Professional Bio
Dr. Thomas holds a PhD and MA in English from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA, and is the first African American and first BIPOC tenure track faculty in the Pomona College English Dept (also core faculty in Africana Studies, and affiliated with Gender & Women's Studies, American Studies, and Media Studies). She taught Pomona’s first and (for decades) only courses in Screenwriting and in Native American Literature. She was awarded two Wig Foundation Distinguished Teaching Awards, the Draper Center Community Outreach Award, a Queer Allyship Award, a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship and was on the Fulbright Specialist Roster for five years. Dr. Thomas curated the first African Diaspora art exhibition and symposium at Pomona College, “Vertigo@Midnight: New Visual AfroFuturisms & Speculative Migrations,” featuring an array of international artists, films, performances, and lectures, installed at two galleries simultaneously, and organized the biannual collaborative symposium, “Healing Ways: Decolonizing Our Minds, Our Bodies, Ourselves — A Week of Healing.” In the early 2000s Prof. Thomas introduced meditation, mindfulness practices, and somatic pedagogy in English and Africana Studies courses Dr. Thomas' courses include AfroFuturisms, Literature of Incarceration, Introduction to African American Literature, Film and Literature of the African Diaspora, Toni Morrison, Contemporary Native American Literature, Native Women Writers, Exile/Nomadism/Diaspora, and Healing Narratives. She has consulted for the Getty Institute and The HERD Institute. She holds certifications from The Mindful Leaders Project and Innerlight Method. Dr. Thomas' work has appeared in Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change, Dis...Miss Gender, Black Cool: 1001 Streams of Blackness, Jalada Africa, African American Review, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, TOPIA, Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling About Racism in Higher Education, International Journal of the Humanities, and Biography.
"We have always been here. Our ancestors prepared and became the landscapes and world for the coming humans with order, knowledge, and gifts embedded in the landscape." Julia Bogany, Tongva Elder, Land Acknowledgment 2021
https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/tending-nature/you-will-not-b