Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Originally from Detroit, MI, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American curator, producer, poet, choreographer, and performance artist currently based between Philadelphia and New York City. He is a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, a 2011 Fellow as part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and an inaugural graduating member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University.

He has held producing and curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and The Watermill Center. His work in performance practice is rooted in a creative mission to push history forward through writing and socio-political art making. Kosoko’s work in live performance has received support from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through Dance Advance, The Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, The Joyce Theater Foundation, and The Philadelphia Cultural Fund. His newest performance work #negrophobia recently made its European premiere at Tanz im August, Berlin and will tour throughout Europe in 2017. The work is also nominated for a 2016 "Bessie" Award. 

As a performer, Kosoko has created original roles in the performance works of visual artist Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, Headlong Dance Theater, among others. Kosoko’s poems, interviews, and essays have been published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, Silo, Detroit Research v2, Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), The Movement Research Performance Journal, and Critical Correspondence (NYC). In 2011, Kosoko published Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit (Old City Publishing). He has served on numerous curatorial and funding panels including the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Movement Research at Judson Church, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Baker Artists Awards, Bemis Center, among others. He continues to guest teach, speak, and lecture throughout the US and abroad. Kosoko is a Gibney Dance boo-koo resident artist and a recipient of a 2016 USArtists International Award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.