Gabrielle Civil

GABRIELLE CIVIL is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over fifty performance art works around the world including the déjà vu—live (2022), Jupiter (2021), and Vigil (2021). Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), (ghost gestures) (2021), and the déjà vu (2022). Her writing has also appeared in New Daughters of Africa, Kitchen Table Translation, Migrating Pedagogies, and Experiments in Joy: a Workbook. In 2023, she will perform translations at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle; activate dolls as an Artist-in-Residence at Automata Arts in Los Angeles; and perform black feminist wandering in Pilgrimage as a Performance Fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, MN. She teaches creative writing and critical studies at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

[image description: Gabrielle performing at the end of Jupiter on Zoom for the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival in 2021. She is a brown-skinned black woman with curly, natural black hair sprawled under a grey folding table in her studio. She is staring straight into her laptop, wearing 1980s illuminated pink plastic glasses with pink slats across the lenses. You can see her wide eyes through the pink frame. She sports thin, metal hoop earrings, the circumference of a gala apple and has on a black long sleeved top that gives a glimpse of her abundant brown cleavage. In the background, on the left, you can see a yellow wall and, on the right, an office chair draped with a fuzzy sweater and a bit of a bookcase blasted by light.]