jaamil olawale kosoko
jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American choreographer, author, performance artist, and curator. jaamil’s interdisciplinary practice merges performance, video, sculpture, and poetry, exploring queer Black theory, emergence, and critical rest-care strategies for BIPOC+ liberation and reparation. jaamil is the author of Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts as well as two poetry chapbooks: Animal in Cyberspace and Notes of an Urban Kill-Floor.
As an educator and community organizer, jaamil teaches and facilitates in Black-centered creative non-profit and corporate sectors. They have served on grant panels including MAP Fund, NYFA, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and continue to curate projects in live performance domestically and internationally. jaamil’s works including The (chrysalis) Archives, Black Body Amnesia, Chameleon, Séancers, and Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia have toured to venues including EMPAC, Fusebox Festival, The Guggenheim Museum, ICA at VCU, Montréal Arts Interculturels, Museum of Arts and Design, New York Live Arts, and Wexner Center for the Arts, among others.
jaamil has received a Doris Duke Performing Arts Technology Lab grant, LMCC’s Extended Life Residency, a Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, a La Becque Residency (Switzerland), two MacDowell Fellowships, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, and a Princeton Arts Fellowship. They have held curatorial positions at New York Live Arts and FringeArts, and lectured at Princeton University, The New School, Bennington College, and Sarah Lawrence College.
Photo Credits: Freddy Koh, Maria Baranova, Freddy Koh, EMPAC, still from the film Black Body Amnesia: Live