Dr. Nino Rodriguez envisions a world in which black males are free to discover who they are and what they can achieve.  His mission is to promote healing among black males by curating spaces, developing programs, and creating policies that equip them with the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for liberation.

 

Born on the West side of Chicago, Dr. Nino grew up navigating the development of his double consciousness, as a black and Puerto-Rican male, that lived in the South suburbs of University Park Illinois during the school year and spent the summers in Humboldt Park with his father. What was once viewed as an impediment to his identity development is now embraced as his training ground for his life as a scholar-practitioner working with black males and males of color from all backgrounds.  

Long before he sought to use his knowledge, skills, and abilities to play his part in leaving the world a better place than he traversed, Dr. Nino battled to resist the maladaptive norms imposed upon his black body – a journey that he continues to navigate to this day.  This journey has been guided by the pursuit of his answer to one question: ”What does it mean to be a black man in America?”

 

In seeking his truth, Dr. Nino acquired his PhD in the Social and Cultural Studies of Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  His studies allowed him to develop as an interdisciplinary scholar due to his motivation to deconstruct the phenomenon of black manhood to liberate black males from western European ideals that promote maladaptive ideologies, roles, and norms.  

Guided by black feminist thought, Dr. Nino uses his academic training coupled with his life experiences to reconstruct black manhood to empower black males to create internal capacity and external spaces that allow us to:

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(a) resist the limited roles afforded to black males in America;

(b) heal from the trauma inflicted upon us due to the correlating norms; and

(c) reconstruct black manhoods that heal opposed to harm ourselves, our families, and our communities.

Currently, Dr. Nino is a Post-Doctoral Humanities Fellow in Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies as a member of the Social Transformation Research Collective at DePaul University.  In addition, he serves as the CEO and Founder of R3volutioNino, where he uses his training as a Social Justice Educator to support educational institutions and community-based organizations in developing cultures, programs, and practices that resist the Imperialist, White Supremacist, Capitalist, and Heteropatriarchal ideals that maintain the inequalities in America and beyond.

 

When he isn’t engaged in the Defense Against the Dark Arts, Nino enjoys exploring self-care practices and listening to Hip Hop’s philosophers such as Sean Michael Leonard Anderson, Jermaine Lamarr Cole, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, and Cordae Amari Dunston, to name a few.