Mamoudou Nango

Mamoudou Nango is a master dyer and the founder and director of the Centre Indigo, a textile training center in the Bandiagara region of Mali, West Africa. He is also the president of the CAPID, a cooperative of indigo textile artisans in the Dogon region, with over 100 members.

He is an accredited tour guide and worked for many years as an information officer on gender with a focus on maternal health and the prevention of obstetrical fistula in his region.

Mamoudou comes from a long line of indigo dyers in his native Dogon Country. He started the cooperative to professionalize local indigo dyers and promote their craft in order to develop new products and open wider commercial markets for handcrafted indigo and mud-cloth textiles. He has organized numerous craft textile training workshops for women and youth in his region, with the support of a Swiss NGO, the European Union and the US Embassy in Mali. He collaborates frequently with Virginia Friends of Mali, a group representing the sister cities of Segou, Mali and Richmond, Virginia.

Mamoudou is fluent in French and several African languages, with limited knowledge of English. He will be accompanied on his trip to the US by his partner Erica Pomerance, a Canadian filmmaker.