The Chicago writer and filmmaker has carried Afrofuturism from a book into a dance film, a fictional planetary system and a planetarium dome. Each form asks an audience to take part in imagining what comes next.
The Adler Planetarium’s description of Niyah and the Multiverse places a Chicago preteen opposite her older self, an astrophysicist. The encounter gives scientific speculation an emotional form: one possible future stands before the person who might live it. The encounter does not prove that the child will become a scientist. It makes that life imaginable, visible and open to inquiry.
Ytasha L. Womack cowrote the show's script with Taylor Witten. The Adler Planetarium credits local actors and a wider group of artists, musicians, photographers and specialists in African cultures and Afrofuturism. That collaborative structure matters. A planetarium show is not a writer's sentence projected on a ceiling. It is a constructed environment with voices, images and a particular architecture of attention. Womack's contribution is to place a child's imagination at the point where family stories, comic books and science class meet.
Womack has made Afrofuturism a subject of research and a working artistic method. Her 2013 book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture helped give readers an account of the movement's literature, music, visual art and speculative thinking. Her fiction follows Rayla Illmatic through planetary independence, shifting time and questions of identity. Her film A Love Letter to the Ancestors From Chicago treats dance as a passage across times and spaces. These projects differ in scale and medium, but they share a conviction: the future is something one can rehearse through a story, a movement, an image or a conversation before it becomes an institution's plan.
Womack calls herself an Afrofuturist. Her own biography identifies her as an author, filmmaker and narrative designer based in a Chicago practice. Her account of the movement is broad, but her best work stays close to a practical question. What can a person do once they have been invited to imagine themselves beyond the categories that have defined them?
A book that gives the movement room
The table of contents of Womack's Afrofuturism suggests a method. Indiana University Libraries’ catalogue lists chapters that move among a space cadet, a mothership, an African cosmos, a divine feminine, moonwalkers in art and agents of change. The structure resists a narrow definition in which Afrofuturism is simply Black people depicted in spacesuits. Womack follows connections across media and across ways of knowing. Music and books sit near spiritual ideas, painted worlds and social action.
That scope can sound like an attempt to make one label cover everything. Womack's conversation with the MIT Press Journal of Design and Science explains why she wants such a wide lens. She describes Afrofuturism as a way to reimagine the past as well as to make possible futures. A future that ignores past knowledge will merely reproduce the exclusions embedded in the present. A recovered past, however, can be treated as a source of forms, questions and confidence for what has not yet been made.
The book appeared in 2013, when many of the artists Womack discussed were known inside particular communities but not necessarily brought into one public conversation. Its value was not the invention of those practices. Artists had been making speculative Black worlds long before the term Afrofuturism existed. Womack's achievement was to give different readers a route among them. A musician could find science fiction in the conversation; a reader of novels could see how dance or digital art approached similar problems. The book was a map rather than a claim to own the territory.
Womack's own history helps explain the insistence on connections. In a first-person interview with the Midwest Black Speculative Fiction Alliance, she recalls ideas encountered at Clark Atlanta University and the imaginative force of Chicago house music during her teenage years. She describes an interest in science, history and dance that later made sense together under the Afrofuturist name. The order is important. The practices preceded the label in her life. Naming them did not create the experience; it gave her a way to link and extend it.
She also argues that speculative work need not be organized only around inherited trauma. This is not a denial of violence or of history. It is a refusal to let violence become the sole story that gives Black identity meaning. In a conversation with the MIT Press Journal of Design and Science, Womack asks what can be recovered from histories eclipsed by slavery and colonialism, and what that recovered knowledge might make possible now. The question sounds philosophical until one places it beside her characters. A traveler through time or a child speaking to a future self must make those decisions in a dramatized form. The speculative device gives a reader or viewer a distance from habit, then returns them to choices in their own life.
Planet Hope is not simply a destination
Womack's Rayla 2212 begins with a world already in motion. Her description of the book presents Rayla Illmatic as a third-generation citizen of Planet Hope, once a colony of Earth and now independent. Time and space do not hold still in the story. Reincarnation, travel, virtual worlds and love enter its speculative system. The premise offers a productive tension. Independence is an event in a planet's political history, but it does not guarantee that its residents know who they are or how to live with one another.
The name Planet Hope is direct; the plot is less settled. A former colony carries the memory of a relationship it has broken. A third-generation resident did not necessarily experience the break herself, yet she inherits the society that resulted. Rayla's movement across space and versions of life can therefore be read as more than an escape into spectacle. Her world asks how a person lives inside a freedom achieved before she was born. Which parts of an inherited project still need to be made real?
Womack's Rayla Universe page extends the series through Rayla 2213 and Eartha 2198. It describes journeys through inner space, past and future lives, magical waters and virtual worlds. Those elements are not a single technological program. They make the fictional world porous: a space journey can become a question of memory; a virtual environment can change what a character believes about physical reality; a return to a previous life can alter the meaning of a future one. Womack's interest in time is less a fascination with chronology than an interest in how identity survives its rearrangement.
One continuation sends Rayla toward Mars, where hidden waters beneath the surface complicate expectations of the red planet. The image of water under a supposedly dry exterior fits the series' larger habit of finding more than one layer beneath an accepted description. A planet may be understood through its visible surface until an encounter reveals another geography. A person may be treated as one fixed identity until a different memory or future comes into view. Womack makes discovery an opening for relation rather than a declaration of mastery.
The fictional world has also crossed out of books. Womack's biography records versions of the Rayla universe presented through music, dance and an augmented reality game during Afrofuturism nights at the Adler Planetarium. The movement from printed story to participatory setting is significant. A novel reader follows a character's choices; a game participant may be asked to make choices within the world. The expansion suits Womack's broader idea of imagination as a practice. Readers do not have to remain spectators of somebody else's alternative reality. A designed encounter can invite them to test one.
These extensions should not flatten the novels into a brand of interchangeable content. Their sequence and settings matter. Rayla 2212 establishes the political and personal problem of Planet Hope. Rayla 2213 changes location and adds another hidden environment. The participatory versions use a different grammar, with bodies in shared space and decisions made in time. Womack's achievement is to keep a conceptual thread across them while allowing each form to ask something particular of its audience.
Chicago dances across time
In A Love Letter to the Ancestors From Chicago, Womack turns the body into the vehicle. Speaking on a Carnegie Hall Afrofuturism podcast, she describes improvised dance in Chicago locations by performers connected to house music and Black dance schools. She imagines dance as a movement between dimensions. The film's speculative act is not to add a spaceship to a street. It is to make a familiar place appear capable of holding several times at once because a moving person brings memory and possibility into it.
The title is addressed to ancestors, but the film is made in the present. A letter can carry affection across a separation. Dance can do something similar without requiring every feeling to be stated. In Chicago, where Womack grew up and where house music shaped her sense of transformation, improvised movement joins individual bodies to a collective rhythm. The dancers do not need to act out a fixed historical episode. Their steps can answer the people who came before while remaining contemporary and open to what comes next.
A Chicago film-program account describes dance scenes in recognizable South Side places and names participating artists including Khari B, Gira Dahnee and Joshua Ishmon. Those credits matter. An Afrofuturist dance film is made through performers whose styles and histories contribute to its temporal argument. Womack directs the frame and proposes the relation to ancestry; the dancers supply movements no essay could substitute for. The city, too, is more than scenery. Ordinary locations keep the film from implying that a Black future begins only after departure from Black neighborhoods.
Womack has spoken of dance as a way to reconnect with the body and alter a person's sense of time and space. Her conversation on Standing on the Shoulders links movement to healing and to a larger cosmic relation. In Womack’s account of the film, that idea becomes a formal choice. Her description and the film-program notes place moving bodies in identifiable Chicago locations, while the title asks an audience to think of absent generations. A temporal crossing is made through a repeated physical act rather than explained through special-effects machinery.
This is a distinct version of Afrofuturist form. Music has often offered artists a route into altered worlds; Womack asks what occurs when the route runs through dancers' decisions in a specific city. Improvisation allows surprise. The performers can answer one another in the moment. The future is neither a predetermined choreography nor an empty void. It is a series of possibilities made visible by people capable of moving differently together.
A child beneath the dome
The Adler show Niyah and the Multiverse places another Chicago child in a setting designed for collective looking. The planetarium's production account says Niyah encounters theories of many worlds, shadow matter and bubble universes. She brings to them stories from her parents and ancestors, her comics and her science class. These sources of knowledge are not arranged as a ladder with family memory at the bottom and physics at the top. They swirl together in her imagination, giving her a reason to ask what a scientific theory might mean for a life she can picture.
The older Niyah is a powerful narrative choice. A distant adult scientist might lecture the child from an authoritative position. A future self brings the authority close and makes it conditional. The child can recognize an adult possibility without being trapped by it. She may ask how that life came to be and how many other lives remain possible. A multiverse story makes the question literal, but the emotional proposition is familiar to any child wondering what kind of person they might become.
The planetarium also describes a cat named Bast, whose name invokes an Egyptian deity, among Niyah’s companions. Adler's science essay uses the cat to introduce the famous thought experiment about quantum states. The detail is more than a playful mascot. It lets a child and an audience approach an abstract problem through a figure with story, design and cultural resonance. An equation alone can describe a theory; a character can make it memorable enough to discuss afterward.
Adler describes the production as a 26-minute fulldome show. That format is designed to surround viewers rather than asking them to look through one rectangle, while the published premise stays centered on a child’s questions. Spectacle can easily make a character small; here the cosmological scale gives her curiosity room. The collaboration with Witten, actors and visual artists means that the written journey becomes an embodied group experience. The fulldome setting holds a promise of visual immersion. The more intimate idea is in the script: Niyah’s future self gives a young person an imaginable relationship to scientific work.
Womack's Adler essay argues that race itself has been constructed through systems of classification and power. She describes imagination as a means of recognizing and moving beyond imposed boxes. In Niyah, that thought is made accessible through a child's encounter with several possible universes. The show does not need to promise that every life will become an astrophysicist's. It gives a young Black girl the intellectual authority to explore a theory and to see her own future as worthy of that exploration.
Krull's Futuristic Dreams works in images and testimony from another geography. Read beside Womack's projects, it shows how speculative art can stay answerable to real places. Womack's Chicago appears in a planetarium child's journey, a dance film and the social imagination behind Planet Hope. The city is not an obstacle from which the future must escape. It is a place where questions about science, ancestry, movement and ownership can begin.
Womack's career makes Afrofuturism travel through books, film, movement and institutions, but the strongest continuity is quieter than that list. She repeatedly returns to the person who has been taught to think the future belongs elsewhere. A dancer claims time through movement. Rayla inhabits a planet with a contested inheritance. Niyah looks at an older version of herself and can ask how she got there. The future, in Womack's hands, is a place to practice being possible.