Arielle Julia Brown
CULTURAL STRATEGIST. PERFORMANCE MAKER. PERFORMANCE CURATOR. DRAMATURG.
Arielle is interested in how cultural institutions and arts initiatives can facilitate social justice and cultural equity through the championing of culturally specific performance. Emerging from her work and research around U.S. slavery, racial terror and justice, Arielle is committed to supporting and creating Black performance work that commands imaginative and material space for social transformation. In service of this work, Arielle's practice is necessarily multidisciplinary as it traverses cultural producing, cultural strategy, performance making, dramaturgy, public history and performance curation.
Woven throughout her cultural work, Arielle teaches and facilitates workshops across various cultural and academic spaces. As a facilitator she has been most transformed by her work on The Love Balm Project, a workshop series and performance that centers the testimonies of mothers who have lost children to systemic violence (2010 -2015|more information below). Additionally, Arielle has taught performance at; Destiny Arts Center, Streetside Stories, Eastside Arts Alliance and Liberation Songs (at Morehouse College). She has been a guest lecturer at the Pomona College Department of Theatre and Dance. Arielle has facilitated workshops and or served on panels at Open Engagement, Common Field, Highlander Homecoming, ROOTS Weekend Atlanta, Theatre Bay Area Conference, College Art Association Conference, Alliance of Artist Communities, ASWAD and others.
For her creative projects, Arielle has been awarded funding from CalHumanities, Center for Cultural Innovation, Akonadi Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Theatre Bay Area, USDAC, AlternateROOTS, Highlander Institute (We Shall Overcome Fund), the Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant, the JKW Foundation, Velocity Fund, The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and MAP Fund.
Arielle was recognized by Intersection for the Arts as as 2014 Changemaker. She was a Mellon Artistic Leadership Fellow for the 2014 Encuentro at LATC. She was a 2017-2018 Inaugural Diversity and Leadership Fellow at Alliance of Artists Communities. Arielle was a 2019 Monument Lab National Fellow. Arielle received her B.A. in Theatre from Pomona College and holds an M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University where she was the 2015-2017 Public History of Slavery Graduate Fellow with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
CURRENT PROJECTS
What's up now?
Remember 2019
To unearth. To listen. To amplify
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.
Fallawayinto
A Performance Installation Shaped in the Image of Donna Booker
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 public workshop of the performance will take place in Philadelphia - March 19, 2020.
HOLLERS/Breaks and Intercessions
HOLLERS/Breaks and Intercessions
A series of gatherings for Black elders across Black churches | Praying, imagining and interceding for Black Freedoms. Learn more about this work here.
Black Spatial Relics
Black Spatial Relics: A New Performance Residency around Slavery, Justice and Freedom
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 project that supports new performance work about slavery, justice and freedom. To learn more about the project, check out the website here.
PAST PROJECTS
Here are some images, video and writings from some of my previous creative projects
The Love Balm Project (2010 -2015)
A theatre workshop series and performance based on the testimonies of mothers who have lost children to systemic violence.
The Doubleback: Inquiries into Freedwomen's Gaze (2016)
A Site Responsive Performance and Witness Driven Conversation
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.
California Shakespeare Theater | Triangle Lab Residency (2013 & 2014)
The Triangle Lab
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.
Teatro Luna: Generation Sex (2015)
At the Los Angeles Theatre Center 2015
This is an excerpt from Generation Sex a devised work by Teatro Luna. This iteration of the project was produced at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Here is an excerpt (Bits of Teeth) that I wrote and helped to develop.
Transatlantic Conversations (2015)
Creating Together // Remembering the Other in Me
I co-taught the course Transatlantic Conversations in support of lead artist, Asiimwe Deborah GKashugi with Dr. Joyce Lu. I also worked as the co-director and dramaturg for the performance. For more information and to see some of the content featured in the project, check out the project blog here.
WRITINGS
Black Spatial Relics and Lifting Black Vigilance
May 2019
When everything and all we got is each other, outside eye turned protest and our best recollection. Read more about it here.
Creating Place While Building People Power: How ROOTS Weekend- Atlanta Insisted on Traditions of Place and Spirit
January 2018
Listening to the Land/Playing off the Crowd: Black Public Performance Interventions in Artmaking and Placemaking
November 2017
Loud.Black.Resident
October 2016
A conversation series for Arts.Black on Black site specific performance and Black Displacement. The featured artists in this conversation series are Dr. Omi Osun Joni L Jones, Marcus White and Amara Tabor Smith. Read the editors note here.
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines
March 2016
I wrote a piece about The Love Balm Project for this landmark anthology about radical mothers, collectives, and artists of color. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens and Mai'a Williams, this anthology also features never before published work by June Jordan. Get it on amazon here!
Transatlantic Conversations: Dramaturgy as Public Humanities
Jan 25, 2016
This is a blog I wrote for the Public Humanities department at Brown University about my dramaturgical work on Transatlantic Conversations at Pomona College. Read it here.
Activating Allyship at Encuentro 2014
November 2014
This is a Howlround blog about my work and experience at a Mellon Artistic Leadership Fellow at the 2014 Encuentro Festival. Read more about it here.
