our team
Jennifer Pagán, Co-Director
Jennifer Pagán is a shamonic reiki practitioner, yoga instructor, educator and liberatory organizer from Chicago, IL. Jennifer is a founding collective member of the #LetUsBreathe Collective and currently directs the #BreathingRoom Space, the organization’s movement building community center and liberation oasis on the South Side of Chicago. She is also founder of NurturHer, a healing home and space where participants grow deeper in practice and bear witness to each other’s healing through a constellation of modalities including yoga, breath work, somatics, mindfulness, and shamonic reiki.
Pagán taught Middle School Literacy at Village Leadership Academy from 2018-2020 and coordinated a historic student-led grassroots campaign that changed the name of Douglas Park, originally named after infamous slaveholder and slavery advocate Stephen Douglas, to Anna & Frederick Douglass Park, honoring the abolitionist freedom fighters. Pagán co-created Black Abolitionist Network (BAN) and launched the #DefundCPD Campaign where she led arts & propaganda efforts and facilitated grounding & centering work for the wider campaign. She believes in healing as a vehicle for transformative change.
E'mon Lauren, Co-Director
The #LetUsBreathe Collective is so honored to welcome the inimitable E'mon Lauren as co-director of Programming & Operations. She leads Pod Squad and Open A.I.R. programming at the #BreathingRoom Space.
E’mon Lauren was named Chicago’s first Youth Poet Laureate. Her work unpacks her coined philosophy of “hood-womanism”. She is an artist and educator from the Wes and Souf side of Chicago and has been featured in Vogue Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune. Her work has appeared in the BreakBeat Poets Anthology series, Volumes 1 & 2, Poetry Foundation Magazine, The Reader, South Side Weekly and elsewhere. She is host of her hit talk show, “The Real Hoodwives of Chicago’’, produced by her production company, BlkHoneyBun Productions, LLC. Her first chapbook of poems, ”COMMANDO” , was published by Haymarket Books.
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