Keshad Adeniyi is a visionary with a heart for education, advocacy, and activism. In addition to academia he believes that artistic mediums such as poetry, rap, and visual art, are instrumental to educating people who come from various walks of life. His thoughts have allowed him to teach others in a number of schools and prisons, both, locally and internationally through organizations that are doing transformational work in carceral spaces. The Prison Education Project (PEP), The Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI), and Columbia University Riker’s Education Program, to name a few. These experiences have offered him the opportunity to travel abroad to do similar work in the maximum security prisons in Uganda, Africa and London, England.

As a native of Watts, CA, Keshad has seen and experienced a lot of turmoil from which he has gained insight and in turn, it has influenced him to take on the moniker, Ife Nira, meaning "love is pain."

He most recently graduated from New York University American Studies, Social Cultural Analysis Program. He conducted research on Branding and its implications on race. Here he investigated branding within the context of slavery and incarceration as a way to incite critical discussion regarding methodology when it is used by the state to help track and control black bodies. His research used the stories of Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Dolly as markers for historic moments in the United States where the state leveraged different branding methods to help aide in the capturing of black bodies deemed "out of place.” He is currently completing his PHD in Black History at Howard University - here he is researching the implications impressment during the Civil War had on the carceral elements that come into fruition at the start of the Reconstruction Era.

He hopes to add to the conversations regarding Abolition.

- Keshad Adeniyi (Ife Nira)