jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, educator, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent, originally from Detroit, MI. Their conceptual and process-based practice fluidly moves across live performance, video, sculpture, and poetry, integrating ritual, spiritual inquiry, and embodied poetics. Through Black critical studies and queer theories of the body, kosoko conjures radical strategies for freedom, healing, and care, offering an expansive vision of artistic and social transformation.
kosoko’s interdisciplinary work explores emergent Black queer theory, critical rest-care strategies, and the politics of visibility and fugitivity. Their projects—ranging from multimedia installations to performative lectures—bridge experimental art with community-driven engagement. As a curator, kosoko has held positions at New York Live Arts and FringeArts. In 2022 they curated Portal For(e) the Ephemeral Passage (Wexner Center for the Arts and co-curated the 2019 Black Poetry Conference at Princeton University. Their global impact as an experimental performance and film maker include projects such The (chrysalis) Archives (2024), Black Body Amnesia (2022), Chameleon: A Visual Album (2020), Séancers (2017), and the Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia (2015). Their works have been presented at leading international institutions and festivals, including EMPAC, New York Live Arts, The Guggenheim Museum, ICA at VCU, Wexner Center for the Arts, Fusebox Festival, Tanz im August (Berlin), Blackbox (Oslo), Beursschouwburg (Brussels), The Centre for the Less Good Idea (Johannesburg), and Montréal Arts Interculturels, among others.
kosoko is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Doris Duke Performing Arts & Technology Lab Award for Mapping the Ephemeral Passage, a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Award, the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, a 2022/24 MacDowell Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a 2020 NCCAkron Creative Administrative Fellowship, a 2019 NPN Creation & Development Fund Award, a 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, a 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, a 2018-2020 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency, a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, and multiple consecutive USArtists International Awards from 2016-2020.
Blending poetry, memoir, and performance theory, kosoko’s book Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts(2022) serves as the foundation for Black Body Amnesia: LIVE, a performance work examining the fugitive realities of Black diasporic life in America. As an educator, kosoko has held residencies and teaching positions at Bennington College, Princeton University, UCLA (Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair, 2020), The University of the Arts Stockholm, and Master Exerce, ICI-CCN in Montpellier, France. They regularly lecture on performance, digital archiving, and Black queer aesthetics, bridging artistic practice with critical pedagogy.
kosoko’s current initiative, Mapping the Ephemeral Passage, is a groundbreaking digital archiving tool suite designed to support artists in documenting and preserving their creative work. This project integrates performance-based archival methodologies with technological solutions for metadata tagging, digital preservation, and estate planning.
kosoko has served
on grant panels for the MAP Fund, NYFA, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts,
and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. They are a founding
advisory board member of the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving and an
artistic advisory member of The Field Center in Vermont.
Portrait by Ryan Collerd
