Shakti Butler, PhD Filmmaker and Racial Equity Educator

Shakti Butler has decades of experience as a catalyst for racial equity. Shakti Butler, PhD is a master at inviting people to see themselves as indelibly connected to each other and the world we live in. Dr. Butler is a multiracial AfricanAmerican woman (African, Arawak Indian, and Russian-Jewish) whose work as a creative and visionary bridge builder has challenged and inspired learning for over two decades.

Butler is an inspirational facilitator, trainer and lecturer. Her work emerges from years of self-exploration and her commitment to social justice. Dr. Butler’s services are sought after by schools, universities, public and private organizations, and faithbased institutions.

Learn more about Shakti Butler and see footage of her here.

Using film & dialogue, she invites people to grapple with both the intellectual and emotional complexities of social justice issues.

Dr. Butler shares her holistic framework for conveying the interconnection between internal and external/structural components of racial inequity, and revealing how selfperpetuating systems reinforce disparities in institutions. This framing, along with the use of Butler’s films, set the context for constructive conversation. Butler inspires a collective will and develops deeper, cohesive understanding that can be directly applied to analysis, healing and action.

A warm and compassionate person, Butler uses her ability to listen deeply while asking critical questions that support self-directed learning in others. Her speaking and teaching styles enrich people’s abilities to expand their capacities for building community, an important first step in effecting change. Group dialogue, self-inquiry, reflection and whole body learning by participants are some of the strategies she employs.

Butler is the producer and director of groundbreaking documentaries including The Way Home: Women all about Race in America, Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible, and her latest film Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity. This latest film uses a critical mass of stories to illuminate the larger frame of structural/ systemic racial inequity. See clips of her films here.

Dr. Butler is the President and Founder of World Trust Educational Services. She received her doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies in the School of Transformative Learning and Change. She holds an MA in Guidance and Counseling from Bank Street College of New York and graduated magna cum laude from City College of New York.