About Kaytura

Spiritual Activist. Physician. Researcher. Storyteller. Advocate for Black birthing futures.

  • I've spent more than two decades studying the impact of structural racism on health outcomes in America — first as a primary care physician, then across senior roles at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where I led national initiatives on health center quality, safety-net research, and health equity.

    In 2023, I found myself asking a different question. Instead of documenting more of what medicine gets wrong for Black birthing people, I wanted to know: what is the Black community already doing to save Black mothers? That question became Black Birthing Futures, a study I lead as a Distinguished Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

    Over two years, my team and I interviewed more than 114 Black community midwives, clients, family members, and community leaders, and observed midwives caring for families in their homes and in birth centers. What we found is documented in three peer-reviewed publications — in Archives of Public Health, JAMA Health Forum, and the Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health — and in Deep Care, the podcast I host, produced with PRX and featured by Apple Podcasts.

    The throughline of all of it: Black community midwives are already solving what the health care system has not. The family is the sun, and all the providers are orbiting them. My work now is making sure that solution gets the attention, funding, and policy support it deserves.

  • My path to medicine was guided by a childhood quest to address injustice in that field. My training began in medicine — a Doctor of Medicine from Weill Cornell Medical College, an internal medicine residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars fellowship at Johns Hopkins. From there, I spent over a decade in senior federal health roles, including Chief Medical Officer for HRSA's Bureau of Primary Health Care and Senior Advisor at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, where I worked on national policy to close health disparities. During that time, I developed the understanding that spirituality is foundational to justice and began my practice of spiritually-informed activism.

    I later became Managing Director at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where I led a team overseeing more than $400 million in national leadership development investments for people advancing health equity. Alongside that work, I trained as a coach in generative leadership and have supported physicians and executives navigating complex organizational change for over a decade.

    Today, I bring all of it — medicine, community-based research, spirtual activism, leadership development, and now documentary storytelling — to the work of building a beloved future where Black birth is safe and joyful.

  • This work isn't about admiring the problem. It's about centering what's already working, and asking what it would take to invest in it at scale. Whether I'm in a birthing room, a boardroom, a classroom, or on a stage, I bring the same commitment: human dignity, rigorous listening, and a belief that communities already hold the answers we're looking for.

    “The family is the sun and all the providers are orbiting them.”

    — Kaytura, on Commonwealth Fund's The Dose podcast

    I live in Trenton, New Jersey, with my husband, and am the proud mama of a filmmaker.

“When there is love, nothing is too much trouble and there’s always time.”

— ‘Abdu’l-Bahá