jaamil olawale kosoko

jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, educator, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent, originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s practice considers emergence, queer Black theory, and critical rest-care strategies as a vehicle for BIPOC+ liberation and reparation. They work across education, performance, video, sculpture, fashion, and poetry, merging cultural, political, spiritual, and academic frameworks of inquiry.

As an educator and community organizer, jaamil leads restshops and facilitates conversations and retreats on embodied poetics, performance curation, ethics, and emergent creative strategies within Black-centered creative nonprofit and corporate sectors. They guest curate both domestically and internationally and have served on grant panels for MAP Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others. Through continued investigation of all of these elements, kosoko seeks to craft modes of freedom, healing, and care.

jaamil’s staged works—including The (chrysalis) Archives (2024), Black Body Amnesia (2022), Chameleon (2020), Séancers (2017), and the Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia (2015)—have toured globally to venues such as Abrons Arts Center, The Centre for the Less Good Idea (SA), EMPAC, Fusebox Festival, Gibney, The Guggenheim Museum, HAU (Berlin), ICA at VCU, Montréal Arts Interculturels (CA), Museum of Arts and Design, New York Live Arts, PICA, and Wexner Center for the Arts, among many others. They have received numerous awards, including an inaugural Doris Duke Performing Arts Technology Lab grant, Brooklyn Arts Council grant, LMCC’s Extended Life Residency, 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, 2022 La Becque Residency (Switzerland), 2021/22 and 2023 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, and a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, among others.

jaamil has held curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, FringeArts, and The Watermill Center, and has lectured at Princeton University, University of the Arts, Bennington College, UT Austin, and Sarah Lawrence College.