Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a performing artist, choreographer, and writer. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in her work. After graduating from Yale College of Arts and Sciences in 1996, Okpokwasili moved to New York City to continue performing. In 1998, she trained in Butoh dance with Min Tanaka at the Body Weather Farm in Hakushu, Japan. Soon afterwards, she began a series of collaborations with choreographer and director Ralph Lemon. Their work together includes How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?; Come Home, Charley Patton; a duet performed at The Museum of Modern Art as part of On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century; and Scaffold Room. During this period, she also performed in many downtown New York theater works, including Nora Chipaumire’s Miriam; Kristin Marting’s SOUNDING; Young Jean Lee’s LEAR; Richard Foreman’s Maria Del Bosco; Richard Maxwell’s Cowboys and Indians, and Joan Dark.
In 2008, she and her longtime collaborator and husband, Peter Born, began presenting their own work in New York City. It has since been staged throughout the United States and internationally. Their work blends dance, visual arts, and text to create productions and participatory practices that have been shown in theaters, galleries, museums, and public spaces. Their productions include, among others, pent-up: a revenge dance; Bronx Gothic; poor people’s tv room; poor people’s tv room solo; when I return who will receive me; Adaku’s revolt; adaku, part 1: the road opens; let slip, hold sway; and my tongue is a blade. Participatory practices include sitting on a man’s head and procession. Their album day pulls down the sky was released in 2020.
Okpokwasili and Born’s work has been exhibited in museum and gallery installations internationally, including at the New Museum in New York; The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the Kunsthall Trondheim in Trondheim, Norway; Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, UK; Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles; and at the Venice Biennale. Their work, poor people’s tv room (solo) installation (2021) is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum. In 2020, Okpokwasili co-curated the Danspace Project Platform Utterances from the Chorus, which brought together performing artists around a central question, “How do we weave a collective song?”
Okpokwasili’s work extends into film and music videos, including Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Stephan Littger’s Malorie’s Final Score, Knut Åsdam’s ABYSS, Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter, Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax, Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend; and the video for Jay-Z’s song 4:44, directed by Arthur Jafa. She has also worked with many renowned film and theater directors, including Carrie Mae Weems, Terence Nance, Camille A. Brown, Josephine Decker, Charlotte Brathwaite, Jim Findlay, and Annie Dorsen. She played a principal role in Mika Rottenberg and Mahyad Tousi’s 2021 feature film Remote, as well as the titular character in Jaume Collet-Sera’s 2025 film The Woman in the Yard.
Okpokwasili has received commissions from the Institute for Contemporary Arts/Boston; The High Line; the French Institute Alliance Française; Danspace Project; Jacob’s Pillow; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the American Dance Institute; Walker Art Center; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Performance Space 122; Le Mallion in Strasbourg; Théâtre de Gennevilliers in Paris; Theatre Garonne in Toulouse; Zagrebačko Kazalište Mladih (ZKM), and the Zagreb Youth Theatre.
Okpokwasili’s awards include New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for pent-up: a revenge dance (2009) and Bronx Gothic (2014) as well as for her performance in Ralph Lemon’s Come Home, Charley Patton (2005). In 2018, she received the Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a Doris Duke Award, a Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She received an inaugural Antonyo Award in 2020 for Best Featured Actor in the Public Theater’s production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. In 2025, she received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She has received numerous fellowships and residencies from institutions including The French American Cultural Exchange (2006-2007); Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (2012); Baryshnikov Arts Center (2013); New York Live Arts Studio Series (2013); Under Construction at the Park Avenue Armory (2013); New York Foundation for the Arts (2013); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Program (2014-17, 2019-20); ICPP at Wesleyan University (2015), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts’s Artist Grant in Dance (2014); BRIClab (2015); Columbia University (2015); the Rauschenberg Foundation (2015); and Carolina Performing Arts, UNC-Chapel Hill (2019-2022). Okpokwasili was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist. In 2019, Okwui was a Movement Research Resident Artist supported by the Rosin Fund. In 2022, she was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at the Museum of Modern Art. She was an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023. Okpokwasili currently lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Peter Born, and their daughter Umechi.
