Ariel Ward

Ariel Ward is a professional daydreamer and scholar in the metaphor of the mundane. She writes in the wonder of what happens when our lives move beyond the velvet curtains of taboo and silence to make place together on the main stage of our realities. An alumna of Howard University, she is a civil engineer and city planner by trade, but an interdisciplinary creative and poet by birth. Sustained by the art of gathering, Ariel is the founder of exhale. collective, where she co-curates creative wellness spaces in the Bay Area for Black women, femmes and girls to breathe easy and heal, out loud. A descendant of the brilliance and joy of black British and Caribbean matriarchs, her creative conjures are anchored in crafting a sense of belonging and/or connection, physical or felt.