2024 Another Audience Artist
jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. kosoko moves across the creative realms of live art performance, video, sculpture, and poetry using both cultural and academic idioms. As an educator and community organizer, they approach politics and education as extensions of their creative process. Through ritual and spiritual practice, embodied poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body, kosoko conjures and crafts perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible.
jaamil’s works – including Black Body Amnesia (2022), Chameleon (2020), Séancers (2017), and the Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia (2015) – have toured to venues and festivals such as Abrons Art Center, Gibney Dance Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, Fusebox Festival, Montréal Arts Interculturels (CA), Moving in November (FI), TakeMeSomewhere (UK), SICK! (UK), Tanz im August (DE), Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival (Norway), Zurich MOVES! (CH), Beursschouwburg (BE) and Spielart Festival (DE) among others.
jaamil is the recipient of several awards including the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short film, 2022 LaBecque Residency (Switzerland), 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, among many others.
jaamil has held curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and The Watermill Center. They lecture regularly at Princeton University and The University of the Arts Philadelphia. Visit jaamil.com for more information.
(chrysalis) is a hybrid live performance installation and virtual theatrical experience that uses original and found-footage, expanded cinema techniques, and queer feminist archival strategies to create participatory traces of a Black past, investigating the ghostly way in which Blackness travels through digital mediums and how digitally haunts the material world as a means to examine concepts of metamorphosis, intergenerational knowledge, blood memory, and the complexities of living and dying while Black in America.
This project extends kosoko’s exploration of what Christina Sharp calls wake work—tending to those who have transitioned and/or who have yet to arrive onto this plane—as well as rest work and dream work and how these practices feed into the imagination as a vehicle to explore futurity, to explore what is on the horizon and what is yet to come. Through conjuring and manifesting ancestors and imagining different ways of being, this work engages themes of the nonhuman or, as another audience proposes, the beyond human, with a deep interest in ecologies of care and tending to the earth.
BLACK HOLE HOLLOW 