Nakita Valerio

nakita-4.jpg

Nakita Valerio, ‘09 BA, ‘17 MA
Faculty of Arts Representative

Nakita Valerio is an award-winning writer, researcher, and community organizer based on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton. She is a current PhD student in Religious Studies at the University of Alberta, studying Muslim women’s Qur’an memorization groups in Morocco. Her previous graduate studies were in Islamic-Jewish Moroccan history at the University of Alberta, and she also acts as an academic strategist/mentor for graduate students in the arts, especially history, religious studies, and psychology.

She served as the Research Director for the Institute for Religious and Socio-Political Studies (I-RSS) for almost 3 years and remains the Editor-in-Chief for the RSS Journal, published through the U of A Libraries Open Journal System. Nakita is the founder of The Nusaibah Collective (a holistic Muslim women's study group) and is a student of the traditional Islamic sciences in Arabic language, Qur’an and others, with her shuyukh and anses.

Nakita serves as an advisor to the Chester Ronning Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life at the University of Alberta Augustana Campus, is the recipient of the 2018 Alumni Horizon Award and is the sponsor for the Fatima Al-Fihri Graduate Award in Islamic Studies. She is also the co-founder of a primary school in rural Morocco where she lived for several years before returning to Canada. Additionally, she serves as an alumni representative on the GFC University Teaching Awards Committee. Nakita is currently writing a novel.