“Mimi ni, kwa sababu sisi ni: na tangu sisi ni, kwa hiyo mimi ni.”
”I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.”
—John Mbiti, Kenyan Theologian
Board Members
Founder and President, I. Murphy Lewis
Vice President, Alexis Adler
Secretary, Sara Driver
Treasurer, Melodie Gatz (CFO of Legacy Global)
Founder and President, I. Murphy Lewis
I. Murphy Lewis, Photo by Cheryle Van Scoy
I. Murphy Lewis and the Xai Xai Bushmen by Carol Beckwith & Angela Fisher AfricanCeremonies.com
“At what point will we stop exterminating indigenous people, marginalizing those who are different than we are, who believe in different gods, worship in different ways, have a different color of skin? Isn’t it time that we honored them, giving them an opportunity to share.”
After seventeen years on Fashion Avenue in New York City, working for Bergdorf Goodman, Mary McFadden, Leonard of Paris, Halston, and Badgley Mischka, I. MURPHY LEWIS earned a Ph.D. in (Worldwide) Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology and Culture from Pacifica Graduate Institute (2007), continuing her Depth Psychological training at the C.G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht, Switzerland (2010-2013).
What spurred on her extreme departure from a well-honed ready-to-wear career to step into indigenous myths, was a read of Sir Laurens van der Post's A Mantis Carol that catapulted her on an explorative journey into the Kalahari Desert of Botswana to visit the Kalahari San Bushmen (1995); and an encounter with an intuitive, Mariah Martin who encouraged her to heal a past life with the Maasai Warriors. This led to her initiation as a laibon, dream-shaman among a group of Maasai Warriors, elders, healers, and storytellers through the microdosing of medicinal herbs of baths and teas, a naming and a water ceremony (1998-2004), inspiring a restorative memoir, Across the Divide to the Divine: An African Initiation (April 2023) and a short documentary, To the Sacred Forest of the Lost Child (2007). Twice with National Geographic, she traveled around the world to touchdown on Legendary Places, to create a greater understanding of other cultures. Into the heart of the Kalahari Desert, on ten safaris, she explored the myths of the San Bushmen (1995-2010), publishing Why Ostriches Don't Fly and Other Tales from the African Bush (Libraries Unlimited, 1997), and recording their music, directing three short documentaries, Why Ostriches Don't Fly (1998), Music that Floats from Afar (2002), and How Do You Name a Song? (2003). She launched the original Global Voice in 2001 to benefit the many friends she developed in Africa.
I. Murphy Lewis with the Bushmen in Northern Botswana, Photo by Nicole Litchfield
Louis Sarno with Sara Driver and I Murphy Lewis
Louis Sarno with Sara Driver and Alexis Adler
Along with Pitt Rivers Museum’s Noel Lobley, Radio France’s Max Bale, the Sarno family, Global Voice friends and funders, Alexis, Sara, and Murphy helped realize the digitalization of Louis Sarno’s life work recordings of the BaAka music and forest rituals, returning these to the people through Radio France’s Radio Ndjoku in the Central African Republic.
Vice President, Alexis Adler
ALEXIS ADLER has worked for over 30 years in human reproduction, becoming an early embryologist at the start of the Cornell University program with Dr. Michael Bedford, helping to establish the laboratory later joined by Drs. Jacques Cohen, Santiago Munne and Gianpiero Palermo among others. The protocols devised at Cornell remain the foundation of human embryology. Adler left Cornell, with Dr. Jamie Grifo launching the NYU laboratory that she ran for almost 20 years before diverging into the art world while continuing to consult in embryology.
During her time at NYU she had the opportunity to work with Dr. John Zhang on his grounbreaking work on GV transfer and help establish a laboratory in his hometown in China. Adler helped to initiate blastocyst culture along with developing the TE biopsy/vitrfication program at NYU that has become the backbone of that clinic, improving the pregnancy potential of all patients but especially the older patients whose embryos are plagued by aneuploidy and treating patients with genetic disease and those who have failed IVF previously. Since leaving NYU, Adler has worked at New Hope Fertility, CCRM, and Extend Fertility. Adler has authored or co-authored some 40 publications, presenting papers nationally and internationally and consulting as well as serving as the chairperson of the NY Embryologist Society and of the embryologist society within ASRM establishing guidelines and protocols in embryology.
Adler has also toured with her Archive of early works by the artist Jean Michel Basquiat along with her photography of him, appearing in the documentary “Boom for Real”, that you can find on VOD. She has also shown her photomicrography of embryos that she has encountered.
Adler also is involved in the community gardens in the East Village, her block association and the coop where she lives.
Secretary, Sara Driver
SARA DRIVER is an American independent filmmaker living in NYC. A participant in the independent film scene that flourished in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s, she gained initial recognition as producer of two early films by Jim Jarmusch, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver has directed two feature films, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), as well as a notable short film, You Are Not I (1981), and the feature documentary, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017), on the young artist's pre-fame life in the burgeoning downtown New York arts scene before the city's massive changes through the 1980s. She's served on the juries of film festivals and her work has been shown in retrospectives internationally. Currently she is featured in and wrote a short documentary cartoon Stranger Than Rotterdam that is opening the Sundance Film Festival 2022. For more information, visit Wikipedia and IMDB.
“I joined the Global Voice Board to continue the work of Louis Sarno who was one of my dearest friends and was a remarkable person. I knew him for almost 40 years. He often stayed with us when not in the Central African Republic with his BaAka family. He not only recorded. and preserved the BaAka’s incredible and elegant music but was their main medical care, advocate and liaison with the modern world. He tried to bring education to them. He organized the radio station, Radio Ndjoku (that we now help support) with the aid of Radio France in order for the BaAka to hear their music and traditions as well as stay in touch with the world (critical during Covid). He worried about not only the survival of their music but of the BaAka’s own survival in an unfriendly treacherous world.”
Treasurer, Melodie Gatz
MELODIE GATZ is the President and CEO of Legacy Global Charities (the 501c3 who holds our fiscal sponsorship). She consults with family offices and foundations across the nation and internationally, advising on administration, finance, risk management, controls, planned giving, alternative assets, and international transactions and activity.
Over the years, Ms. Gatz has mediated resolutions for organizations, families, and individuals in solving tax, bankruptcy, legal actions, planned giving, and ethical trust violations. She has solved complicated tax problems for donors and charities and provided education on the valuation, acceptance, and investment of non-cash and alternative assets for organizations and families. https://www.legacyglobalfoundation.org