JAAMIL OLAWALE KOSOKO

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian-American curator, poet, and performance artist from Detroit, Michigan. He is a 2017 Jerome artist-in-residence with Abrons Arts Center, a 2017 Association of Performing Arts Presenters Leadership Fellow, a 2015 American Express Leadership Fellow, a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, a 2011 Fellow as part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and an inaugural graduating member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University. He has held producing and curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and The Watermill Center, among others. Kosoko is the recipient of a 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, a 2019 DiP Residency and Production Grant Award from Gibney, a 2018 Live Feed Residency from New York Live Arts, a 2016 Gibney Dance boo-koo residency, and a 2016 U.S. Artists International Award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.

Kosoko has created original roles in the performance works of visual artist Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. Kosoko’s poems, interviews, and essays have been published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, Silo, Detroit Research v2, Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), MR’s Performance Journal, and Critical Correspondence (NYC). He continues to guest teach, speak, and lecture throughout the U.S. and abroad. His performance work #negrophobia received a 2016 New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award nomination and toured throughout Europe.
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Kosoko came to NCCAkron in September 2018 for an Administrative and Strategic Planning Residency. NCCAkron is a presenter partner for Kosoko's 2018 work Chameleon, a multi-tiered, multimedia performance project that examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people within the American context.