iCon

Sha'Condria "Icon" Sibley is a Central Louisiana-born and longtime New Orleans-based storyteller and sage, poet, writer, performing artist, visual artist, teaching artist, singer, songwriter, actress, wellness advocate, and visionary, whose work centers the voices of (Southern) Blk/Indigenous Women/Girls/People through ancestral remembrance and recollection, present position and power, and future hope and healing. Her work spans across page, stage, canvas, music, talk radio, and short film. Raised in the small-town, southern missionary Baptist church tradition with an educational background in biology and public health, her work naturally intersects between spirituality and healing. A proponent of poetry and art as healing and liberation tools, Icon shares her work and workshops inside schools, universities, prisons, juvenile detention centers, at conferences and festivals and has worked for over a decade and counting, creating, organizing, and hosting community-centered, arts-driven events. 

A founding member of the multiple-time national poetry slam championship group, Team SNO (Slam New Orleans), Icon also became a multiple-time nationally ranked individual slam champion herself. Her work has gone viral several times (including her poem "To All the Little Black Girls With Big Names") and has been featured in several documentaries, exhibits, and on outlets such as Upworthy, Huffington Post, For Harriet, Fusion, Marie Claire, Teen Vogue, In Style, and BBC World Radio. She appeared as a featured poet on Season 3 of TV One's Verses and Flow (2013) and has also been published in several anthologies, including Sanctuary (2017), Beyond Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire: Reclaiming Images of Black Women (2018), I Am New Orleans (2020). 

Icon's work extends far beyond the page and the stage, where she was the co-founder of the former Write, NOLA! Festival, a response to displaced poets, artists, and spoken word enthusiasts following Hurricane Katrina and the orchestrated flooding of the city of New Orleans. For over 3 years, she returned home to pioneer a poetry movement in her hometown of Alexandria as the host and organizer of is the Rhythm & Rhymes Spoken Word Performing Arts Series at the Alexandria Museum of Art, which featured notable artists from across the country to a consistently packed audience. She also has taught poetry and performance within a maximum-security prison, where she helped to form a poetry slam team of inmates who competed against college-level poets who she also mentored (and won!). Once serving as the lead organizer of the New Orleans Youth Open Mic (NOYOM), the only open mic for young poets at the time, she eventually joined the team as an organizer, curator, and co-host for Pass It On, the longest running open mic in the city of New Orleans. 

An artist of many mediums, Icon is the co-writer of two short films, Love Tap (2018, Ellen Sandor Award Nominee, Black Harvest Festival) and A Dream For Sale (2020, Best New Orleans Film and Best Sound Design, Black Film Festival of New Orleans), which she also starred in. Her short stage-play, Braking Waters, was selected to showcase as part of a cohort at the Victoria Stages at the Apollo Theater (2025). As a performer, she has touched many popular festival stages, including Essence Music Festival, New Orleans Jazz Festival, and French Quarter Festival. She is the creator and former co-host of The Front Porch, an artist and community-centered weekly talk radio show on WBOK 1230AM. Her work is also featured on several music projects alongside artists like Grammy Award winner, Tank and the Bangas, and Golden Globe Award winner, Idris Elba. Icon is the author of My Name Is Pronounced Holy: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, Rememberings, and Reclamations (2021) with an upcoming book on the way in 2026.