Ogemdi Ude
Space Grant (2019/2020)

I am a Brooklyn-based dance and interdisciplinary artist creating performances, texts, installation, and media that focus on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. I use movement and voice as a tool for digging up personal and sociocultural narratives, and processing grief. I am interested in how we search for objective “truth” to justify grief; why we seek evidence of our relationships to that which we have lost. How do we find people, cultures, and histories that aren’t there anymore in all the bits that are? I engage the body holistically to re-member: sew together the fissures that trauma creates in our personal narratives.

I work to ensure the wellness of Black, brown, femme and queer communities. This extends to my work as a doula, where I offer critical intervention in the high death rates of birthing people and babies by providing hands on support before, during, and after labor and delivery.

My work has been presented at BRIC, Abrons Arts Center, ISSUE Project Room, Danspace Project, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, Lewis Center for the Arts, and for BAM’s DanceAfrica festival. I have worked with artists including iele paloumpis, Marion Spencer, Rebecca Lazier, Susan Marshall, Stuart Singer, Aaron Landsman, Melanie Lane, Prue Lang, Raven White/BIRDHOUSE, Urban Bush Women, Oskar Eustis, Laurie Woolery, and Lear deBessonet.

I am a 2022-2023 Smack Mellon Studio Artist, 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, and 2022 Center for Performance Research Artist-in-Residence. I have been a 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 I appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University.

Website: https://www.ogemdiude.com/