this is not a bio page.
most “about” pages tell you what someone does. this one tells you who i am and where i come from.
start with i am if you want to know what i do and why i do it.
go to bloodline if you want to understand what made me.
one is the present. one is the record. both matter.
isso não é uma página de bio.
a maioria das páginas “sobre” te conta o que alguém faz. essa te conta quem eu sou e de onde venho.
comece com eu sou se quiser saber o que faço e por quê.
vá para sangue se quiser entender o que me formou.
um é o presente. o outro é o registro. os dois importam.
Courtney, also known as Sisi in Brasil, is a psychic, catalyst, speaker, podcast host, and multipotentialite living in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. She has spent over 20 years self-employed across industries — digital strategy, app development, event production, community building, and energetic activation work — without a safety net and without asking permission.
Her path has moved through Brooklyn, Detroit, rural Oklahoma, a church in Florida, and now a curved glass balcony overlooking the Atlantic in Bahia. She didn’t move around because she couldn’t settle. She followed what was alive.
Courtney is the granddaughter of Manley Ray “Bubba” Bell, and the great-great-granddaughter of Buck Colbert Franklin — the attorney who set up a law office in a canvas tent in the rubble of Greenwood after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, sued the city, and won. Her cousin is John Hope Franklin, one of America’s most important historians and author of From Slavery to Freedom. Her documented family tree spans 500 years and six continents of ancestry — Powhatan, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Yoruba, Acadian, and Scottish lineage, DNA confirmed.
She now lives in Brazil — the largest African-descended city outside of Africa — where her Yoruba ancestors’ cousins were brought on a different ship 230 years ago. She didn’t plan it. The blood found its way home.
As a catalyst, Courtney does not operate from the assumption that anyone is broken. She translates energy into language, names what sits just under the surface, and gives people enough of a spark to set everything else in motion. Her clients have launched businesses, booked out their calendars, left relationships that were killing them slowly, and finally stopped circling their lives and started living them.
She is the creator of faafo.app, the founder of Lingua by Sisi (a music-based language learning method), the host of Move to Bahia Brasil with Sisi, and the architect behind a seven-show podcast network, a relocation service for Americans moving to Bahia, and the Vanguard Mystery School. She is currently writing her first book and building toward a speaking tour.
Her work has been featured in Elle, broadcast news coverage, and professional stages across the United States. She has received a President’s Administrative Award from the Community Healing Network for over 15 years of service as webmaster, community organizer, and summit coordinator.
Courtney speaks to audiences about ancestry, sovereignty, identity, relocation, and what becomes possible when you stop performing your life and start living it. She delivers the truth with warmth, dry humor, and the kind of directness that only someone with 500 years of documented audacity in her bloodline can carry.