Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born Reveal New Creative Projects for 2024-25

Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer Okwui Okpokwasili and visual artist and sound designer Peter Born, acclaimed for their highly experimental, formally inventive cross-disciplinary work, are excited to announce new projects for 2024-25, and the creation of two pilot programs supporting other artists in their field.  

This summer, Okpokwasili and Born will be in residence at the Field Center in Bellows Falls, VT, where they will explore physical scores for future iterations of their adaku trilogy, the first part of which premiered at ICA Boston in May 2023. As part of the residency, Okpokwasili will lead a public walking practice each morning. Okpokwasili began a practice of leading processional walks in public spaces in 2016, and together with Born, she invites participants to explore their relationship to themselves, the collective, and the site-specific nature of the setting. They have also recently returned from the Atlantic Center in New Smyrna Beach, FL, where they served as Mentoring Artists-in-Residence.

Sweat Variant has been commissioned by the Whitney Museum to create a work for Edges of Ailey, the first large-scale museum exhibition to reflect on the life, work, and legacy of visionary artist Alvin Ailey (Sept 25, 2024-Feb 9, 2025). This multifaceted presentation encompasses a multimedia exhibition, a scholarly catalogue, and a performance program that will include a new work from Sweat Variant, February 6-8, 2025.

In addition to their own work, Okpokwasili and Born have created two initiatives that support other artists. They believe that a thriving arts ecosystem depends on a network of mutual support and cultivation among artists. The initiatives focus on community and future-building to explore new models for sustaining artists.

“Sweat Variant's work flourishes because of the collaboration and input of other artists,” said Okpokwasili and Born. “These new initiatives are an exploration of how we can provide concrete support for the individual projects of our collaborators, both past and future. We lost a dear friend this past year, Georgiana Pickett. Along with Anna Glass, she gave us our first artist residency at 651 Arts. Georgiana believed that artists are a necessary lifeblood in a community. She wanted artists to take care of themselves and take care of each other, and her commitment to actively laying the groundwork for programs that would realize her vision inspires us.”

For the Artists Supporting Artists Program, a new effort to support contemporary artists, Sweat Variant will provide direct monetary support to artists and small companies to explore and research their own artistry. In the program's pilot year, Sweat Variant is providing grants to Leslie Cuyjet, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Wanjiru Kamuyu, and Stacy Lynn Smith and Alex Romania of Psychic Wormhole.

The second pilot program, the Threading Residency, honors the late Georgiana Pickett, who was a steadfast visionary and tireless advocate for arts and culture. Through an annual nomination process, Sweat Variant recognizes artists who are pushing boundaries and whose work is deeply rooted in rigorous movement-based practice or in live performance. The residency is designed to support artists who reside outside of New York City. Through this residency program, artists will stay in New York City for two to three weeks while developing a specific project. Travel, housing, studio space, and a daily living stipend are provided.

The first recipient of the Threading Residency is Houston-based choreographer Jasmine Hearn. Hearn is committed to performance as an expansive practice that includes a spectrum of dance traditions and techniques, technologies of care, sound design, garment design, and the archiving of matrilineal memories. They give gratitude to spirit, their mothers and aunties, and all the mothering Black people who have supported their moving, traveling, remembering body.

Both of these programs have been made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation.

About the Artists

Jasmine Hearn, born and raised on occupied lands now known as Houston, TX, studied dance and embodied sound from a multitude of teachers, including their sister, cousins, aunties, instructors, and friends at family gatherings, church services, and weekly classes at the Houston Metropolitan Dance Center. Hearn has been greatly influenced by teachers, mentors, and collaborators, including Byronné J Hearn, Claudette Nickens Johnson, Joy KMT, Barbara Mahler, Pamela Pietro, Kendra Portier, Samita Sinha, Sandra Organ Solis, jhon r. stronks, Sherie van den Wijngaard, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Bennalldre Williams, Marlies Yearby, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Hearn received a BA in Dance from Point Park University. They are a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2023), Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize in Design with collaborator Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency (2023), a Creative Capital Award (2022), New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award for Outstanding Performer (2021, 2017), a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019), and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants (2022, 2017). They have been awarded residencies through Movement Research in NYC, Pittsburgh Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France. Hearn is committed to performance as an expansive practice that includes a spectrum of dance traditions and techniques, technologies of care, sound design, garment design, and the archiving of matrilineal memories. They give gratitude to spirit, their mothers and aunties, and all the mothering Black people who have supported their moving, traveling, remembering body.

Leslie Cuyjet is an award-winning choreographer and performer whose work aims to conjure life-long questions of identity, confuse and disrupt traditional narratives, and demonstrate the angsty, explosive, sensitive, pioneering excellence of the Black woman. Since 2004, her tenure in the New York dance world has been decorated with performances and collaborations, both formal and informal; with contemporaries, legends, and counterparts; on rooftops, good and bad floors, and alleyways; on stage, in film, art, on tour, and on the fly. “A strong, subtle presence unassumingly grounds the stage,” says The New York Times. Recent honors include a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists (Dance), a Princeton Hodder Fellowship, and an Outstanding Choreographer/Creator “Bessie” Award for her 2021 work, Blur. ASAP funding helped produce For All Your Life, a performance event and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and Black death. Centered around an ambitious seriocomical short film, For All Your Life is staged as a performance seminar, guided by an insurance saleswoman played by Cuyjet. Part screening, part theater, this solo performance offers a primer on the life insurance industry and its direct connection to slavery; unpacking the ways in which human beings grapple with the inevitable prospect of death and, more importantly, the ways in which lives—especially those of people of color—are monetized.

Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist and facilitator from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing, and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. Their work has been exhibited at venues such as documenta15, The Kitchen, White Columns, and at film festivals internationally. They have been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, the Leslie Lohman Museum, Queer|Art, and the Global Fund for Women. In 2024, they will be in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program as well as Headlands Center for the Arts. Previously, they have participated in residencies at Skowhegan, Red Bull Arts Detroit, and NLS Kingston in Jamaica, among others. They have guest lectured at Emory University, Rutgers University, and the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. Gopee was an Elaine G. Weitzen ISP Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2024. They hold an MFA from UCLA with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Studio and a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University. They have been developing an artist residency and research platform titled a small place, after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. Gopee has served as a researcher and developer for artist residencies and has worked in several capacities with the Artist Communities Alliance, Studio Rawls, and Sweat Variant, among others.

Wanjiru Kamuyu, a Kenyan American artist based in Paris, is an associate artist at the National Choreographic Center Nantes (France) and a Live Feed artist with New York Live Arts (USA). Her career began in New York City, collaborating with notable figures such as Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Bill T. Jones, and Okwui Okpokwasili. In Europe, she has worked with choreographers Robyn Orlin, Emmanuel Eggermont, Anne Collod, and Nathalie Pubellier and collaborated with directors such as Peter Born, Françoise Dô, and Christian Faure, visual artist Jean-Paul Goude, and writers Karthika Naïr and Deepak Unnikrishnan. Kamuyu founded WKcollective and is affiliated with camin aktion (Montpellier, France). Her choreographic projects have toured extensively in the US, Africa, Asia, and Europe, including commissions for productions such as Jérôme Savary's À la recherché de Joséphine, Hassan Kaasi Kouyate's Maitre Harold, and Jean François Auguste's Love is in the Hair. She holds an MFA in Performance and Choreography from Temple University, has taught at Mills College, and is on faculty with University of South Florida's Dance in Paris Program. Kamuyu also leads master classes worldwide and engages in community projects promoting dance and cultural exchange.

Psychic Wormhole (Stacy Lynn Smith + Alex Romania) is a creative research platform and production company making live multidisciplinary performance work and experimental film. The duo excavates trauma and somatic memory as a means to reclaim embodiment as autobiographical material is filtered through the genres of horror, sci-fi, Afrofuturism and arthouse cinema. Recent work includes Face Eaters at the Chocolate Factory Theater, an epic, live, multimedia performance work processing Romania's family experiences with grief, mental illness, and suicide. With the generous support of Sweat Variant, Psychic Wormhole is working toward completing its debut film, RECKONING, a visceral abstract memoir which grapples with Smith's experiences of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and Complex-PTSD.

Stacy Lynn Smith is a neurodivergent, Black mixed-race performing artist and improviser, choreographer, director, and Green Circle Keeper at Hidden Water (by and for those affected by childhood sexual abuse). Dedicated to collaboration, Smith creates, devises, improvises, and performs across disciplines and genres with an array of talented artists, including DeForrest Brown Jr., Anna Homler, Karen Bernard, Thaddeus O'Neil, Rakia Seaborn, Vangeline Theater (2008-2017), Michael Freeman, Saints of an Unnamed Country, Salome Asega, GENG, Donna Costello, Bradley Bailey, Michele Beck, Jasmine Hearn, mayfield brooks, Josephine Decker, and others. Most recently, Smith has worked with Kathy Westwater, Jill Sigman, Emily Johnson, Joan Jonas, Peter Born and Okwui Okpokwasili, as well as working on their own artistic projects and as one half of the creative duo Psychic Wormhole (with Alex Romania). Smith's work has been presented at CAVE, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Socrates Sculpture Park, Rosekill, Glasshouse, 92Y, Performance Mix Festival, Snug Harbor Dance Festival, St. Augustine's Church via Abrons Arts Center, and more. Smith is a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and a 2024 Djerassi AIR.

Alex Romania is a multidisciplinary filmmaker, performing artist, and improviser who has held residencies with MacDowell, Djerassi, Movement Research, Old Furnace, Tofte Lake Center, The Center for Performance Research, Chez Bushwick, and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Romania's recent projects include Face Eaters, created in collaboration with Stacy Lynn Smith, which premiered at the Chocolate Factory Theater in May 2024, co-directorship of the experimental documentary Patch the Sky with Five Colored Stones, conceived by choreographer Daria Faïn, and the collaborative short film Mira! Mira! Mira! with Daniela Fabrizi and the Re Hecho community in the Lower East Side. In addition to creating original work that has been presented internationally at spaces such as Grace Exhibition Space, Abrons Arts Center, Encuentro, Casa Viva, UV Estudios, Sub Rosa Space, Romania has performed in various works by Kathy Westwater since 2013, and has been featured in the work of Simone Forti, Éva Mag, Eddie Peake, Andy de Groat, Catherine Galasso, and danced early on with George Russell and De Facto Dance, which extended practices of the improvisational choreographer Richard Bull. Romania has had several video and object designs featured within the works of Antonio Ramos, and has worked in various filmmaking roles with Marin Media Labs, TAAMAS / Sarah Riggs, Trixie Films / Therese Shechter, Christopher “Unpezverde” Nuñez, Martita Abril, and Sarah White-Ayòn. Romania received a BFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 2013.