Okwui Okpokwasili

Okwui Okpokwasili is a choreographer, performer, writer and multidisciplinary performance maker born in the Bronx in 1972 to a family shaped by Nigerian immigration. She earned her B.A. from Yale University in 1996, an education that brought performance, writing and theatre into conversation rather than treating choreography as a closed vocabulary. Her artistic practice places Black women's interior lives, memory and resistance at the center of formally rigorous work that reshapes the relationship between performer and witness.

Okpokwasili developed a sustained collaboration with choreographer and director Ralph Lemon as a performer. Her work in *Come home Charley Patton* received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer, and later projects with Lemon included *How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?* and *Scaffold Room*. These collaborations placed bodily endurance, voice, history and the unstable position of the witness at the center of performance.

She also built a body of authored performance with her collaborator Peter Born, whose contributions include direction, visual design and production architecture. *Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance*, which premiered at Performance Space 122 in 2008, received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production and established a practice in which audience proximity, sound, text and spatial design are active choreographic materials.

*Bronx Gothic* brought that method to wide attention. This solo work addresses girlhood, sexuality, race, friendship and vulnerability through a demanding physical and vocal score, receiving a 2014 Bessie Award for Outstanding Production. The piece uses invented correspondence, embodiment and theatrical structure to produce a deliberately complicated encounter. It later became the subject of Andrew Rossi's documentary of the same name.

Subsequent works—including *Poor People's TV Room*, *Adaku's Revolt*, *when I return who will receive me* and *Sitting on a Man's Head*—extended her investigation of diaspora, women's histories, collective memory and participation. Presenters and museums have commissioned these projects across dance and visual-art contexts, confirming that the category-crossing is structural rather than incidental.

In 2018, Okpokwasili received a MacArthur Fellowship alongside a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Herb Alpert Award in Dance and a Princeton Hodler Fellowship. Her work was commissioned for the 10th Berlin Biennale that same year. In 2022, she and Peter Born became the inaugural artists in MoMA's Kravis Studio Residency program. In 2025, she received an Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her ongoing practice continues to join performance-making, teaching, conversation and installation.