Born and raised in Oakland, California, Ariel Luckey is an interdisciplinary artist and activist. He is the Development Director at Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led land trust, where he co-created the Shuumi Land Tax, a reparative grassroots funding strategy for rematriation initiatives. Ariel has actively supported an emerging national network of Indigenous land taxes and the return of numerous land sites to Indigenous stewardship. He is also a co-founder of Jews On Ohlone Land, a vibrant Jewish collective that is learning together how to be good guests in Lisjan territory.
Ariel earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College and has been an Artist in Residence at La Peña Cultural Center, the White Privilege Conference, and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People at U.C. Berkeley. His autobiographical plays Free Land and Amnesia, commissioned by the National Performance Network and Hewlett and Gerbode Foundations’ Playwright Commission respectively, illustrate his life as a cartography of race, class, land, and radical genealogy. Ariel has performed at hundreds of theaters, universities, conferences and community centers across the country.
Ariel is a storyteller, strategist, and coalition builder. He lives in an urban forest with his beloved and their two sons.