Working to Be Free: Building Zuri World Studios From Lived Experience

By Mpingo W Uhuru

My name is Mpingo Uhuru, and I am the Founder & CEO of Zuri World Studios—a multidisciplinary creative house rooted in storytelling, liberation, and truth. My work sits at the intersection of literature, spoken word, visual media, and cultural documentation, but the real foundation of Zuri World Studios is lived experience.

I didn’t come to storytelling through comfort. I came to it through survival.

For years, I lived inside systems designed to silence, erase, and misname people like me. Systems that taught me early that creativity was a luxury, not a lifeline. But what those systems failed to understand is that for marginalized people, creativity is not decoration—it is infrastructure. It is how we remember ourselves. It is how we stay alive.

Zuri World Studios was born out of that understanding.

I created Zuri World not as a brand chasing trends, but as a container for truth. A place where Black, trans, justice-impacted, and historically excluded narratives are not filtered for comfort or palatability. A place where identity is not explained away but honored in full. My work asks hard questions about freedom, belonging, and the cost of becoming who you really are in a world that profits from your silence.

As a writer and speaker, I focus on themes of identity reclamation, resilience, creative survival, and the long work of becoming free. My debut release under Zuri World Studios, Leaf Blower, is not just a book—it is a reckoning. It explores what it means to clear away inherited debris: trauma, expectation, fear, and imposed narratives, so something honest can grow in their place.

But Zuri World Studios is bigger than one book. It is an ecosystem. It includes publications, spoken-word performances, visual storytelling, and community-centered conversations.

It is designed to hold both beauty and discomfort, because real transformation requires both. I believe deeply that storytelling is a political act, whether we name it that way or not. Every story we tell either reinforces the world as it is—or helps imagine the world as it could be.

Building Zuri World Studios has required me to step into leadership without a roadmap. There was no template for someone like me to follow. Instead, I’ve had to become fluent in both art and infrastructure: learning how to protect intellectual property, build sustainable creative models, and advocate for my work in spaces that were not built with me in mind. That process has been humbling, exhausting, and profoundly clarifying.

What keeps me going is purpose.

I do this work for the people who were told their stories were too much. Too angry. Too complicated. Too inconvenient. I do this for the younger versions of ourselves who never saw their truth reflected anywhere. And I do it because I believe that visibility without integrity is hollow—but visibility rooted in truth can change lives.

Zuri World Studios is my contribution to that change. It is my refusal to shrink. My commitment to telling the truth out loud. And my declaration that freedom—real freedom—is something we must build, piece by piece, story by story.

Connect With Mpingo

@thepoetmpingo

@zuriworldstudios