Ada Parris.
One question arrived in 2017. Everything since has been one long answering of it.
What if intelligence is not something we possess, but something that arises through relationship?
This is the long memory underneath all four movements of the practice: Stillness, Origin, Irreversible, Lineage.
Her work moves between ancestral intelligence, AI ethics, and living systems — and the places where those three have not yet learned to speak to each other. Nine years building a practice for reading what the inherited maps cannot show. The practice is called SOIL. It moves in four movements.
How the work begins
Before strategy, before the framework, before the answer — the conditions to stop. Founder of The Presence Lab™. Originator of the SOIL salon practice. The room is made audible to itself first.
Where the questions come from
Her ancestral DNA research traces seven lineages — East African, West African, Coptic Egyptian, Ashkenazi Jewish, South Indian, Southern European, and British/Irish — and informs the artistic body of work Cartography Is Not Home, surfacing publicly in 2026. Honorary Fellow at Arts University Plymouth — ongoing research into material intelligence: sonic field recording, DNA sonification, mycelium-printed structures. The frameworks (Four Freedoms™ 2018, Cyborg Shamanism™ 2019, The Myth of the Ego 2020) come from this root, not from the trend cycle.
What the work leaves behind
Source Patterns Intelligence™, the TERRA Method™, Threshold Coaching™. Rooms held for Google, Meta, Lloyds Banking Group, National Grid, Adidas, Unilever, Shelter, Tate Modern, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and TEDx. Recognised by Forbes among the world's most influential futurists. Member, IEEE Global AIS Flourishing Initiative.
What the work is for
Author of Leadership Legacy (Wiley, 2026). Chair, Mental Health First Aid England. Published in Atmos on Cyborg Shamanism™ (2024). The artistic body of work Cartography Is Not Home surfaces publicly in 2026 — the long memory underneath everything else.
KES Summit · Brazil · 2023