The Healer
She was born in Ethiopia to parents who had already survived the unthinkable, Sudanese (South Sudanese) refugees who fled the first civil war carrying nothing but their children, their memory, and their faith in what lay on the other side of survival. Nyamal came into the world in the middle of that story. And before she was old enough to fully understand what war was, she had already lived through two of them.
She was resettled as a refugee in South Dakota, United States arriving in a landscape as far from the soil of her ancestors as it is possible to imagine. Cold, flat, largely white, and entirely unfamiliar. What she carried with her was not a blueprint for what came next. It was something older than a blueprint: the ancestral knowing of a people who have always found a way to hold each other through the unholding of everything else.
That knowing became her life's work.
Today, Nyamal is one of the most distinctive voices at the intersection of healing justice, peacebuilding, and ancestral wisdom on the global stage. She is a South Sudanese-Ethiopian-American Healer, Liberation Architect, Decolonial Somatic Practitioner, and Pan-African Feminist whose work spans Southern, East and West Africa, the United States, and the African diaspora. She does not occupy one lane. She has never been built for one lane.
She is a scholar, a healer, a professor, an organizer, an advocate, and a community builder all at once, all the time, all rooted in the same question:
What does it cost a people to survive, and what do they need to truly live?
She has spoken at the UNHCR Global Refugee Forum. She has contributed policy guidance to the White House. She founded Matkɛl, co-founded the NyaEden Foundation, serves as Healer-In-Chief at The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice, and teaches Conflict Transformation, Restorative Justice, and Mediation as Adjunct Professor at Arcadia University.
Her published research on trauma-associated psychiatric disorders among South Sudanese Dinka and Nuer women resettled in the United States (Global Social Welfare, 2020) and her Certificate in Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery from Harvard Medical School (2024) ground her practice in both scholarly rigor and lived proximity.
She was a refugee child in South Dakota who did not know what she would become.