GOLD Speakers

Ihotu Jennifer Ali, MPH, LMT, CLC

• Speaker Type: Food as Medicine: Advancing our Approach to Perinatal Nutrition Add-on Lecture Pack
• Country: U.S.A.

Biography:

Ihotu Jennifer Ali, MPH, LMT, CLC (she/her) is a public health educator, researcher, and integrative massage therapist specializing in myofascial release therapies including the Arvigo Techniques of Maya Abdominal Therapy®, Craniosacral Therapy, Prenatal, and Infant Massage as a Spinning Babies Aware Practitioner®. She is founder and owner of Black Moon Bodywork, LLC which offers massage therapy blended with health coaching in integrative and indigenous practices to support hormone balance, sexual and reproductive health, and reproductive justice.

Ihotu’s decade of experience in femme and family health includes years as a DONA certified birth doula and lactation counselor, prenatal yoga teacher and dancer, rape crisis counselor, Institute for Integrative Nutrition coach, and director of pre-conception health programs funded by the March of Dimes. She has collaborated with midwives and physicians in Haiti, Nigeria, Congo, and Morocco, and worked in health policy and research with the U.S. Congress, Clinton Foundation, United Nations Millennium Development Goals, and Columbia University’s School of Public Health. Raised between Minnesota, New York City, and West Africa with respect for both indigenous and evidence-based medicine, Ihotu strives to offer innovative care that is affordable, consent- and trauma-informed, gender fluid and ancestrally rooted. Her writing, public speaking, and coaching brings together emerging science in hormones and gut-brain health, functional medicine, Reproductive Justice and Afrofuturism movements, and intercultural commentary on the busy modern lifestyles, social pressures and anxieties, violence and unresolved trauma often at the root of today’s chronic health conditions.