Sage Ni’Ja Whitson (they/them) is an international multiple award-winning transgender artist and futurist, noted by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer and the Park Avenue Amory as a “trailblazing XR artist to know”. They are a MacDowell Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, Creative Capital and two-time “Bessie” Awardee who engages anti-disciplinarity through a critical intersection of the sacred and conceptual in science, technology, and art. Their multi-form works on dark matter and dark energy, via The Unarrival Experiments, have been commissioned across the world and media, including recently at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Black Speculative Arts Movement – Denver, a forthcoming solo exhibition at the California African American Museum, and manuscript. Whitson is a sought-after speaker, consultant, presenter, and masterclass facilitator, whose offerings have been shared among notable institutions and arts organizations: Princeton, Cornell, LAX Festival, Movement Research, 2020 keynote of the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance conference, and UNESCO. Sage is the great grandchild of a Black Indian rootworker, life student/practitioner of Ifá and Indigenous spiritual traditions, centering Spirituality, herbalism, care, and medicine in all works. Whitson is the founder and medicine worker-in-chief of Trans RootWerks/ NW RootWerks and the Sacred Somatic practice, a collection of spiritual and medicinal offerings that center Black and Indigenous, Queer, Transgender, Nonbinary, and Intersex communities.
- MELT
- 2013 Artist in Residence
- 2024 summer melt
- Faculty
- 2019 Fall Festival
- AoCC
- Artists of Color Council Former and Founding Member
- Critical Correspondence Contributor
- Festival Spring 2024
- Publishing
- Studies Project Participant