Author, social issues filmmaker, motivational speaker, and VH1 and BET television personality Abiola Abrams is a self declared “Curator of The Goddess Lifestyle.” Her work is about making her mess her message, and using pop culture entertainment in fun and unexpected ways to inspire. Abrams’ high energy talks and workshops are part speech, part spoken word choreopoem, part mini film festival, and always motivational.
Before Abrams became known to the VH1 reality television audience as the character “Miss Picky,” she was known to the BET audience as the host of The Best Shorts, to hip-hop audiences as the author of the popular novel Dare, and to web audiences as the host of the zany and motivational Planet Abiola Show.
Abrams has directed several short films and social issues documentaries, including Knives in My Throat about race, gender, and mental illness in the hip-hop community; Afrodite Superstar, about the beauty myth, sexual erotic identity and empowerment; and Ophelia’s Opera about domestic violence. Her films have shown in festivals, galleries, and museums throughout the US, and in Germany, Nigeria and Guyana. In addition to BET and VH1, Abiola has appeared on Fox and hosted NBC’s Source: All Access Hip Hop Weekend News Show and HBO’s The Buzz: Chat Zone.
Her debut novel Dare is a hip-hop retelling of the classic German fable Faust about a female sociologist going undercover as a rapper. She is currently ghostwriting two autobiographies and completing her next book Abiola’s Goddess Playbook: Take Your Power Back.
For her workshops with incest victims, Abrams was honored by NYC VDay when her motivational writings were performed by actors and she was named their Woman of the Year. Her work as "the goddess passionista" has been written about in Paper Magazine, Self, Essence, Cosmopolitan, RollingOut UrbanStyle Weekly, Esquire, Time Out NY, Upscale, Uptown, Nerve, Good Housekeeping, Today's Black Woman, Carib News, The Amsterdam News, The Village Voice, Black Enterprise and The Observer.
