Arielle Julia Brown

A site responsive performance residency commissioned in its first year (2016-2017) by the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, Black Spatial Relics is an independent organization that supports new performance work about slavery, justice and freedom across the African Diaspora. To learn more about the organization, check out the website here.

Remember2019 is an effort to make space for the congregation of the Black communities and Black cultural workers of Phillips County, AR. Our work is to support and facilitate local practices of self-determination, memory, and reflection, that are directly related to the mass lynching of 1919, the lasting effects of racial terror, and the current and future health of these communities. Learn more about our work here.

A performance installation aspiring to the form of Donna Booker, a Black trans woman activist who endeavored to make of her body a sanctuary. This work has been supported by the Leeway Foundation for a residency at Headlong Dance Theatre (2018) . The work is also supported by the SACHS program for innovation and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies.

A series of gatherings for Black elders across Black churches | Praying, imagining and interceding for Black Freedoms. Learn more about this work here.

I served as co-curator of Staying Power, an outdoor art exhibition and program series in the Fairhill-Hartranft neighborhood of Philadelphia. Staying Power asks artists, residents of the neighborhood, and visitors: What is your staying power in your neighborhood? What is your staying power in a city and world that are rapidly changing? Staying Power seeks to understand, amplify, and invest in the staying power of Fairhill-Hartranft’s neighborhood residents. For more information about this work visit the project website here.

I served as the project dramaturg for Grounds That Shout! Curated by award-winning choreographer Reggie Wilson, Grounds that Shout! (and others merely shaking) was a series of performances that respond to the layered histories of Philadelphia’s religious spaces through contemporary dance, reflecting on the relationships and connections between practices of movement and worship. Over two weeks, eight choreographers and performance groups performed in four historic Philadelphia churches, drawing from site and spirit to present original and re-situated works of dance.

Launched in 2010, The Love Balm Project includes workshops, training institutes for local arts practitioners, peacebuilding symposiums, productions and a site specific performance series - Our Hallowed Ground. For more information about this project, check here.

The DoubleBack was a site responsive series performances and appearances centered around Phillis, Rose and Fanny Chace, three Black women who were enslaved by the Chace family in the late 18th century. The culminating site investigation of The Doubleback was an inquiry into the personal and industrial labor of remembering, applying transhistorical solidarity and ritual performance knowledges to play in the holes of the historical archive and build new thing/memory of Phillis, Fanny and Rose Chace. For more information, images and writings about these performances and appearances - view here.

As an artist in residence with the Triangle Lab at Calshakes, I directed The Adventure of Grief with RAW Talent from Richmond, Ca. For more information about this work, check here. As a part of the residency with Calshakes the previous year I also co-taught a site specific performance class called Disrupting Public Space with artist/activist/curator Jose Navarrete at Intersection for the Arts.

Co-led as a collaboration between Deborah Asiimwe, Joyce Lu and museld, this course and performance engaged young people in the practices of asking the following questions in the work of building across the African Diaspora: How does the persistent portrayal of “Africa” and the “African Diasporic” by people in these locations, as well as by dominant Western media create certain relationships between "blackness," "whiteness" and "otherness" in the global imaginary? And how do these ideas influence our perceptions and frame our prejudices about subjects unfamiliar to ourselves?  How do we find that core that centres us? Can we truly see and embrace the other in us? As the project dramaturg, I created an installation to come alongside this questioning.