jaamil olawale kosoko

I work at the intersection of performance, curation, and embodied research, drawing from Black studies, queer theory, and diasporic memory. Through poetry, movement, sculpture, and video, my work explores how Black and queer life holds grief, ritual, and transformation as sites of knowledge and care. Rooted in rest and metamorphosis, my practice considers the body as a living archive, carrying ancestral memory and future possibility. Each performance installation becomes a contemplative space where masking, draping, and silence uncover hidden realities, transforming the act of witnessing into a ritual of restoration and resistance.

jaamil olawale kosoko is an author, performance artist, educator, and designer whose interdisciplinary practice spans performance, video, sculpture, fashion, and poetry. Rooted in queer Black theory, ritual, and embodied poetics, their work explores rest, emergence, and care as strategies for BIPOC+ liberation, conjuring spaces to experience freedom and healing.

kosoko’s staged work, Voncena’s Spell—which premiered at Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY in 2025—reveals truths, excavates obscured histories, and preserves narratives of the queer Black experience. These inquiries unfold through time-based, multimedia performance and installation, bridging kosoko’s personal research with the landscape of Black visual performance. Set aboard Voncena’s vessel—a bio-intelligent spacecraft that bears the name and essence of kosoko’s late mother—audiences are invited into a centering ritual that transforms the space into a site of collective presence, ancestral dialogue, and caretaking, making the work an evolving living archive.

kosoko’s other works include The (chrysalis) Archives, which premiered at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s River to River Festival, New York, NY (2024); Black Body Amnesia, at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, NY (2022); the hold, which premiered at the Time-Based Art Festival, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2022); and American Chameleon: The Living Installments, a flexible global pop-up community of organizers and practitioners centering adaptive, interactive learning as a way to build sustainable networks of care (presented digitally on Discord, 2020). Earlier works include Séancers, which premiered at Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY (2017), and the Bessie Award–nominated #negrophobia, which premiered at Gibney Dance Center, New York, NY (2015).

kosoko is a recipient of a Bogliasco Center Fellowship (2025), three Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants (2017, 2022, 2025), a Doris Duke Foundation Performing Arts Technology Lab Grant (2024), MacDowell Fellowships (2022, 2024), and a Princeton Arts Fellowship (2019). They hold an M.A. from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University (2017) and a B.A. from Bennington College (2005).