Fellow – SenSaSheri Maasera - Pseads
SenSaSheri Maasera is a professional dancer in her debut season with Saint Louis Dance Theatre. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from the Alonzo King LINES Ballet Program at Dominican University of California, with a minor in Philosophy and Religion. As was one of the inaugural Pseads Fellows, SenSaSheri helped inspire the first Lambert Light Fellowship cohort and currently serves on the Pseads’ Mother Tree Council, uplifting youth voices through the Hope on the Rize program.
SenSaSheri was born in Saint Louis and also spent a lot of her childhood in Bermuda. She grew up in a family active in The Organization for Black Struggle (OBS), dedicated to serving oppressed communities within St. Louis. Her early experiences with Freedom School, gardening, and school district reconciliation fostered a lifelong passion for social and environmental justice, ethics, and a deep connection to nature. Guided in part by her family’s deep rooted spiritual practice, she has developed a love for introspection, mindfulness, and the exploration of spirituality, including through movement.
Fellowship Project Description
During her fellowship, SenSaSheri focused on the adultification of Black girls, inspired in part by Georgetown University’s study Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. She conducted ethnographic interviews and analysis, exploring how adultification impacts and shapes the inner lives of Black girls.
“I first met Elizabeth and Matt at Dominican University. After taking multiple courses with them, I had the opportunity to be one of the first Pseads Research Fellows. During months of reflection and conversation, I was inspired to pursue my own study – deeply influenced by my own reading, especially an article on the adultification of Black girls titled Girlhood Interrupted. I felt compelled to explore how adultification affects my life, family, friends, and the people around me. Pseads offered me the time, space, and support to dive into this topic in my own way, for which I am profoundly grateful…
I wholeheartedly believe that radical change happens when we place ourselves in relationship to systems of oppression… If someone has a better understanding of how they are affected by or how they contribute to these systems, it gives a better understanding of how to dismantle them."
