Roots Unbound is an Illinois-based, reparative storytelling and arts-based racial healing initiative for adults with lived experience of removal from their homes of origin–including foster care, adoption, kinship care, guardianship, and other forms of family separation. We have now finished our workshops!

Join us for the Roots Unbound Showcase on May 23 at 3:00 PM at the Greenline Performing Arts Center, a community gathering honoring stories of identity, loss, healing, and liminality. The showcase will primarily feature dance by Gabriel Gutierrez, a Chicago native, adult adoptee, reconnecting P’urhépecha Native, and founder of MOFundamentals, the only foster- and adoptee-led dance program in the United States. Now based in Los Angeles, Gabriel is a hip hop artist and artivist whose work highlights the resilience of the foster and adoptee community through movement, drawing on narratives of foster-care memory, P’urhépecha, and street dance culture, manhood, houselessness, survival, and grief. Through performance and storytelling, the event will celebrate the power of art to affirm lived experience, build connection, and imagine more healing futures.

Discussion with Gabriel Gutierrez, and Director/Founder of BlackAdoption Project & Roots Unbound, and Gina Miranda Samuels to follow the show.

Our 1st event will be in Chicago May 23rd. A second showing will be downstate in Urbana/Champaign June 20th. Flyers and link to get free tickets below!