With Wings and Roots took its initial shape in 2005 as a video installation by Christina Antonakos-Wallace while she was a student at the New School & Parsons School of Design. The context was post 9/11 New York during an emerging national immigrant rights movement in response to the U.S. Rep. Sensenbrenner’s restrictive Immigration Bill in 2005, and recent uprisings in the immigrant suburbs of Paris. Having lived in Greece, Christina envisioned expanding this video installation into a film focused on young people challenging exclusionary immigration debates in both the U.S. and Europe.

In 2006, she received a Humanity in Action fellowship to intern with UNHCR in Berlin and quickly found that Berlin was the right European city as a companion for New York. As the biggest economy and immigration country in Europe, Germany also had a particularly complex history which had ironically silenced the public conversation of racism. Germany had recently passed federal integration legislation. When Christina began to speak about a media project that would intervene in these problematic debates with new narratives, she found collaborators eager to join.

The film that the team embarked upon was initially titled With Wings and Roots, and was later renamed From Here. Production began in 2007, and collaborators in the US and Germany conducted over fifty interviews, which would become the basis of the STORIES section of this site.

Realizing the feature film might take a few more years to bring out into the world, the team decided to release some short films for community engagement. In 2010, With Wings and Roots released titled Where are you from from? and soon after that Article of Faith for educational use. We began offering screenings with workshops, and rather quickly, grew from a film team to a multidisciplinary initiative, with filmmakers, educators, designers, academics, students, organizers and programmers – in the US and Europe. In addition to shorter events, we began to offer longer storytelling workshops for young people, parties, and presenting at academic conferences.

In 2012, WWAR began developing the concept for our TIMELINES. Several years, many rounds of community and academic feedback, and over fifty volunteers later–we launched both the STORIES and TIMELINES in 2015. We hosted large public events in five cities with panels about what it could mean to narrate belonging differently, and “Reimagine Belonging” in different sectors.

Since 2014, With Wings and Roots has offered training for teachers on how to use our tools with the co-development and release of the “Reimagine Belonging Curriculum” as well as our Curriculum on Gadje Racism, “Miman’s Story.”

In June 2020, From Here, the feature film that spurred the entire effort, will debut at Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Check out the trailer and more information about the film on its website.

In 2022 we formalized our initiative as our own “Verein.” We have operated under various fiscal sponsors, and focused our work on being responsive and independent. With Wings and Roots continues to grow and evolve, fueled by people interested in finding creative ways to intervene in racist debates, and offer complex, critical, and visionary stories of belonging. If you are interested to get involved, reach out: info@withwingsandroots.com