About Mariame Kaba

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, librarian, and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame co-leads the initiative Interrupting Criminalization, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018.  

Kaba is the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Press 2021), Missing Daddy (Haymarket 2019), Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators with Shira Hassan (Project NIA, 2019), See You Soon (Haymarket, March 2022) and No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Andrea Ritchie (The New Press, Aug 2022).

Mariame has curated and co-curated a number of exhibitions including No Selves to Defend, Blood at the Root and Black/Inside. 

Visual Description: A large banner of 99 library cards, each with a title of a book, its author, and August 20, 1971, as the books’ due return date.

Visual Description: A 6 x 9 feet prison cell demo. The front cell wall is made of black metal prison bars, while the other side of the cell is open. The two walls inside the cell are painted olive green. By one wall there is a metal prison bed and a metal toilet stool, and by another wall is a metal prison desk. Displayed on the green walls, are a collection of family photos, some of which are completely painted black, alongside children’s drawings that hang in parallel to their black and white xerox copies.