Okwui Okpokwasili is a performer, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces that draw viewers into the interior lives of women of color, particularly those of African and African American women, whose stories have long been overlooked and rendered invisible. Her formally experimental productions include Bronx Gothic, Adaku’s Revolt, Poor People’s TV Room, and Sitting on a Man’s Head, and bring together elements of dance, theater, and the visual arts (with spare and distinctive sets designed by her husband and collaborator, Peter Born). She has held residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Rauschenberg Foundation Captiva Residency, and New York Live Arts, where she was a Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. She has been awarded several Bessie Awards and was a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Nadine George-Graves’s work is situated at the intersections of African American studies, critical gender studies, performance studies, theatre history, and dance history. She is the author of The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900-1940 (Palgrave Macmillan) and Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of Dance Theater, Community Engagement and Working it Out (University of Wisconsin Press) and has written on primitivity, ragtime dance, tap dance legend Jeni LeGon, identity politics and performance, competition, social change, early African American theatre, and the future of performance in the academy. In addition to her academic work, George-Graves is also an artist, and her creative work is part and parcel of her research. She is an adapter, director, and dance theatre maker. Her recent creative projects include Architectura, a dance theatre piece about the ways we build our lives; Suzan-Lori Parks’ Fucking A and Topdog/Underdog; Anansi, the Story King, an original adaptation of Anansi stories using college students, professionals, and 4th graders; and Sugar, a digital humanities project at the nexus of creativity and scholarship.