Akuyoe Graham

Founder & CEO

Award-winning actor, author, and educator Akuyoe Graham founded Spirit Awakening in 1995 as a way to help incarcerated and underserved children discover their true identities. In juvenile probation facilities and high school classrooms throughout Los Angeles County, Akuyoe guides her students as they develop the tools to grow beyond their circumstances.

Since 1992, Akuyoe has performed in her critically acclaimed one-woman show, Spirit Awakening, which details her physical and emotional voyage from Ghana to Britain to New York and served as inspiration for the Foundation's name. 

Whether in a prison classroom or onstage before hundreds of playgoers, Akuyoe's journey electrifies audiences and moves them to look beneath their own social masks to find new confidence and potential.

Through Spirit Awakening, Akuyoe has become an icon, a way-shower, and a mentor to hundreds of youth who long to find their way back to themselves. Under her liberating influence, people of all ages who have forgotten their youthful vision of life’s greater possibilities are able to reconnect with their original spirit, recast their current condition in a new light, and dream again of who they truly are and can be in the world.