Pelenakeke (Keke) Brown identifies as an immigrant and uninvited guest to Mannahatta, Lenapehoking. She hails from Aotearoa/New Zealand and is a Samoan, afakasi, disabled, queer artist. Her practice is multidisciplinary and spans drawing, writing, movement, and storytelling. Her work is rooted within the Samoan concept of the ‘va’ or ‘in-between space’ and she is always interrogating the relationships amongst the in-between spaces that we each inhabit. She is a 2018 Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project and a founding and current member of the Alien Support Service (ASS) Collective, a collective for immigrant artists, living and working in New York City.
She is a member of Dance/NYC’s Immigrant Artists Taskforce and NYFA Immigrant Artist Program alumni. She has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (VT), Denniston Hill (NY) and Ana Pekapeka Studio (NZ) and exhibited her work in San Francisco, Auckland and across New York. Her non-fiction creative work has been published in The James Franco Review, Movement Research Performance Journal, Hawai‘i Review, and Apogee Journal’s Indigenous #NoDAPL special edition. She is a founding member of Touch Compass, New Zealand’s first mixed-ability dance company. She attended the National Academy School of Fine Art, Studio Intensive Program, NY and received a BA in English literature and Pacific Studies from Auckland University, NZ. Currently she is the Assistant Director of Culture Push, a NYC-based non-profit arts organization.
