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Who We Are


Ximena Alarcon 
Shirley Parker-Benjamin 
​Sangeeta La Biagi
Anne Bourne 
Sadee Brathwaite 
​Marine Caille
Carol Chappell
P​enelope ​C​ookson 
Sylvie Decaux 
Sarah French​


Liz Gessner 
​​​Andrea Goodman 
​L​eslie ​Greene
Anne Hemenway 
​Sohaila ​H​ussein 
I​one
Lisa Barnard Kelley​
Rachel Koenig 
​Erika Kramer 
Michele Lunt 
Pauline Oliveros 
Amy Reed
Judy Robilotti 
​Betty Rojas 
Jesse Scherer 
Jane Solorzano 
Toni Thomas
Mary Elizabeth Thunder
Julia White 
Jacqueline Vogel

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Ione, DMS, CtH, is a dedicated educator, psycho-spiritual therapist and pastoral counselor who specializes in dreams and the creative process. She conducts seminars and retreats throughout the world. She is the Founding Director and Prime Mother of the Ministry of Maåt, Inc. (MoM, Inc.), a spiritual organization specializing in women and community with goals of world harmony and balance.

She is a graduate of the Helix Training Program and a Certified Qi Healer, whose teacher is Grand Master Shi of the Chinese Healing Arts Center.

Ione is a noted author, playwright/director and poet whose works include: the critically acclaimed memoir, Pride of Family Four Generations of American Women of Color, Listening in Dreams and This is a Dream! Other works include: The Night Train to Aswan and Nile Night: Remembered Texts from the Deep.

Ione is the playwright and director of Njinga the Queen King (BAM’s Next Wave Festival) and the dance Opera Io and Her and the Trouble with Him (Union Theatre, Madison,WI), The Lunar Opera, Deep Listening For Tunes (Lincoln Center Out of Doors). She has created two experimental films: Venezia e L’egitto and Dreams of the Jungfrau. Ione and Pauline Oliveros are currently collaborating on The Nubian Word for Flowers, A Phantom Opera. Inspired by the Nubian Diaspora and the life of Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener of Khartoum, the opera is "a deep dream exploration of the Colonial Mind." Ione is also an improvising sound/text artist who performs in the United States and Internationally. She is also the Artistic Director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd.  Both DLI and MoM act to foster harmonious world community.

http://www.Ionedreams.us

http://www.deeplistening.org


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ANDREA GALE GOODMAN holds the title of High Priestess of the Double Maati. Ordained in 1998 and one of the co-founders of the Ministry of Maat, she teaches astrological and mythical perspective, facilitates sound mysteries, and co-creates retreats and ceremonies for the MoM community. Andrea is a vocalist /composer of visionary, metaphoric music. She sings intuitively the river of sound connecting many dimensions. Andrea was a principle performer with the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble, 1974–1991, including world-wide theater and concert touring, and her voice, which can be heard on five albums, has been likened to listening to “... an entire jungle of Amazon birds ...” (Newsday). She is the composer and lyricist as well as actress/singer for Nightingale with Figures of Speech Theatre. Other important works include recordings, Divine Doorways with percussionist Gerry Hemingway, The Moon's Daughter & Other Song Stories, and performing as Sappho, singing in ancient Greek, inSongs of Sappho. Also an author, her book, Lightning Holds My Hand, A Woman's Journal of Guidance, published in 2008 by Ministry of Maåt Press, has been called "A beacon ... to illuminate the dark night of the soul," (Donna Henes). A new essay, “A Path Like Water,” appears in the forthcoming collection, Spell Beaking, Remembered Ways of Being, An Anthology by Ione. She is the founder of Ruby-Throated Spirit, Sanctuary, Voice Studio, and Labyrinth in Boothbay, Maine, where she offers voice lessons, sound-healing, Cosmic Harmony Class, astrology and tarot readings, sacred ceremonies, blessings, and retreats. She considers all aspects of her work to be her ministry. 
www.rubythroatedspirit.com


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Anne Bourne is initiated in the concepts of energy healing by Patricia Langer, Rosalyn Bruyere, Robert Harris, and further in sound, with Ione and Andrea Goodman, and Pauline Oliveros. Anne's experiential research is in inter-dimensional sounding for transition, coma, and distance healing. Anne received a Deep Listening Certificate in New Mexico in 1998. She participated in Women's Mysteries with Ione in New York, Maine, Egypt and Hawaii, from '94 to the present. Her interest in healing became the creation of 'song remedies,' and the restoration of tissue resonance through 'sonic anatomy.' While in Egypt with Ione and the Women's Mysteries women, Anne experienced, especially at Saqqarra, a visual on the sound of architecture, and it's relation to anatomy. These experiences surfaced as drawings and scores.

As a composer and performer Anne reconciles the two streams of sound in her voice, and the natural overtones of her cello. She values improvisation and invitation for its truth and compassion. Anne has performed and recorded extensively, internationally, and often in relationship to songwriters, and other artists. Anne's creative work contains in varied array, the integration of words, dance, film, experimental context, and visual media with sound.

'Anne Bourne is an earthy unrestrained musical force who accompanies her cello with otherworldly vocalizing.' CODA


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Reverend Shirley Parker-Benjamin is an interfaith minister/priestess, artist , writer and Reiki Master. Shirley uses a myriad of modalities to explore spirituality, art, and healing forms. She is an initiated Priestess of Osun for seventeen years. Shirley is the Artistic Director and Founder of Ezili Sacred Arts. Ezili Sacred Arts explores the nexus between art and spirit. Through her visual and written work she focuses on the lives of women and spirituality. Ezili Sacred Arts, Shirley offers teaching through sacred art, movement, and ceremony. 
Eziliarts@mac.com
www.eziliarts.wordpress.com
http://osunswater.wordpress.com


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Rachel Koenig, L.ac, CH is a practitioner of Oriental Medicine specializing in holistic Women's Health, Fertility, and Pediatrics. She directly apprenticed with Jeffrey Yuen, a Taoist Priest in the Jade Purity Tradition, as well as De Ying Huang. Her homeopathic mentors include the late Dr Edward Whitmont, and Alize Timmerman. Founder of Aurora Healing Arts in Park Slope, Brooklyn, she has treated families in community for 18 years. Co-author of the first published collection of Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987), her forthcoming novel, set in Prague during three eras, is entitled The Ravens' Bridge. She is the ninth priestess ordained in the Ministry of Maat.

http://aurorahealingarts.org/



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Julia White is a priestess and sculptor, inspired by the sacredness of each living moment. In her work and life, she celebrates the teachings of the Egyptian Mysteries and the Tantric Wisdom Goddesses of India, and their intertwined roots. As a sculptor, she is interested in bringing form to the formless.  Uninhibited and yet deliberately refined, her works celebrate the underlying creative energy that animates the phenomenal world and that also informs us.  She weaves together materials such as steel, yarn, vines, concrete and cloth into colourful, original sculptures.  Her creative process is one of tuning into this natural current that is evident in the growth patterns of tree branches, root systems and vines and allowing it to flow through her into form. With her sculptural offering, she opens a dialogue between the living mind of nature and the individual, just as she experienced during the art-making process.  Her intention is to invite communion with the viewer...provide a potent atmosphere for connection, by transforming the space her work inhabits into a dream-like sculptural landscape, a sanctuary of sorts where one may connect to the ‘wild currents’ within and simply Be. She lives with her family in a roundhouse in the country near Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada.


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Sangeeta Laura Biagi, Ph.D., is the founder of Soul Sound Academy, a center for the integrated study of Yoga, Astrology and Coaching. She was ordained a Minister of the Ministry of Maat in 2004. A TEDx speaker, educator, and author, Sangeeta teaches contemplative practice for personal and social change.For more information, visit www.soulsound.it/ and Instagram @my_wildest 


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Improvising vocalist and writer, Lisa Barnard Kelley’s first introduction to Deep Listening began on a journey with Pauline Oliveros and Ione to Southern Italy to study the mysteries of the Black Madonna while also taking measurements of acoustical resonance of sacred sites. The journey’s intersection of science and the sacred impacted Lisa so profoundly she spent the next twelve years working closely with Oliveros and Ione as a staff member and artist of the Deep Listening Institute and Ione’s non-profit Ministry of Maat performing in numerous festivals and concerts.  She completed her Deep Listening Certificate after completing her role as conference director for the 2nd Deep Listening Conference in Troy, NY.  Kelley assisted at Deep Listening Retreats in New York, Spain and the UK and facilitates workshops throughout the Hudson Valley.


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Sadee Brathwaite, founder of La Leona Arts – an arts organization dedicated to promoting and supporting the arts through various art initiatives, is an artist, curator and arts advocate. Her drawings and paintings explore issues of beauty, universal womanhood and the metaphysical. Her ongoing studies of Egyptian mythologies and divinities are oftentimes translated into visual form. She draws upon the rich legacies of the ancestors to explore the mysteries of life. As an independent curator, based out of the Hudson Valley, Brathwaite works with a variety of galleries and art spaces to exhibit work that reflects our diverse cultures. She continually advocates and appreciates the importance of diversity in the visual arts. To learn more please visit www.laleonaarts.com.


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half smile of the buddha
lately, i have been smiling more.
i smile, but since i was injured- 
sometimes, it it harder to smile.
i have found myself consciously smiling from the inside. 
i look in the mirror, 
                             and i smile... 
                             all of me smiles.



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With my strength, commitment and integrity I honor, behold bring forth 
and BE the feminine in mind, body and spirit.



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Penelope is a singer, actor, and opera director.  She became involved with the Ministry of Maat in the year 2000, through a Deep Listening Retreat held in Haliburton, Ontario. While dreaming a dream for another, she became aware of her connection to healing ritual, and felt compelled to investigate more with Ione and later, Andrea Goodman.  She has attended many Women's Mysteries Retreats in New York State, Maine, and Ontario.  Penelope was ordained in 2012, from afar, in Egypt, and in person, at Ruby Throated Spirit. As a performer, Penelope worked in Canada, the UK, and Germany, in musical theatre, early music, and opera.  In 2002 she studied opera directing at the Opera Division, University of Toronto, and has since directed over twenty productions and assisted on seven. From 1997 to 2005, Penelope took part in  R Murray Schafer's collaborative project, And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon, held every summer in the Haliburton Forest.  She was also a performer in two of Schafer's works, The Spirit Garden and The Princess of the Stars. She developed a one-woman show called Earthly Pleasures, A Portrait of Colette which she toured in Canada, and she performed the Cocteau/Poulenc piece, La Voix Humaine, another one-woman tour-de-force.  She started to write a music hall piece which she is looking forward to completing and performing one day, when life is less hectic -- if it ever can be. Penelope was born in Montreal, lived in London, England, and now resides in Toronto. She is a certified Laban Movement Analyst, studied T'ai Chi in London, Hong Kong and Victoria, was a member of the Music Theatre Studio Ensemble at The Banff Centre, and is currently doing more exploration in sound healing through Soul Voice (TM) training. Penelope has taught voice and speech and will be teaching acting to children in September 2013.  She is the daughter of an amazing landscape artist (and very special person) to whom she devotes much of her time.


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Anne Hemenway is a writer, administrator, and environmental activist. She began her studies with the Ministry of Maat in 1999 and was ordained as a priestess/minister in February 2012. Recent poetry projects focus on end of life healing, addictions recovery and dream work. 


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Carol Chappell has over 35 years experience in natural healing including being a NYS Licensed  Massage Therapist, instructor of Tai Qi, Qi Gong ( Chinese Healing Exercise), and for the past 13 years has dedicated her life to the study of the use of essential oils in healing based on Chinese Medicine parameters. She has been teaching African Dance in Woodstock, NY for 30 years as a means of expression for women and a medium for the healing sound vibration of live drumming. She is also familiar with various dietary protocols. She lectures on the use of Aromatherapy as a healing modality. She is a dancer and percussionist with Nego Gato Afro Brazilian Music and Dance whom she has also managed for 25 years and serves as lecturer and historian of African Brazilian Culture. In 2012 she completed a Woman’s Mysteries Initiation Journey to Egypt where she was ordained as a Priestess of the Ministry of MAAT. She lives in High Falls, NY with her cats, Tippy and Tookie and also loves to pet sit for 
other people’s critters.


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This project is made possible in part through support from the County of Ulster’s Ulster County Cultural Services & Promotion Fund administrated by Arts Mid-Hudson.
The Ministry of Maåt provides Spiritual, Educational and Holistic support for women and the full spectrum of cultural and gender identities. MoM nurtures creativity in multiple art forms as a foundation of the organization. We consistently wish to honor Black and Brown Histories and Futures.

The Ministry is a 501(c)(3) Not - for - Profit Organization
​Incorporated in New York State in 1997.