Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

“I am especially interested in presenting narratives that disrupt conventional performance to recast the historical positionality of the Black body, confront trauma, and offer creative processes for healing.”

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s performance works incorporate elements of dance, music, poetry, film, and visual art to reflect on Black and queer identity. Their work employs historical events and archival relics to speak to contemporary life and explores how performance can serve as a platform to negotiate difference and create new modes of understanding. In Chameleon—a live performance piece that includes poetry, music, film, a podcast, and a syllabus—Kosoko draws on the words of Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and Luther Vandross “as a map to locate moments of spiritual and psychological freedom,” they say. They have toured widely, presenting their work at US venues such as Abrons Art Center, Danspace Project, Art Basel Miami, and FringeArts and abroad at the Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival in Norway, Brighton Festival in England, and Tanz im August in Germany, among others. They have received a National Dance Project Award, a Princeton Arts Fellowship, and a Cave Canem Fellowship. Kosoko has an MA in performance curation from the Institute of Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University.