Performance: Under Siege
11:00 am–12:00 pm, Doors at 10:30 am

Lynn Nottage and Dominique Morisseau have brought together Black women and Black femme-identifying dramatists together to create a monumental work of art—a piece of theater, a collective gesture, built in the style of an exquisite corpse, where each writer responds to a single question from the writer before them.

RSVP Required



A Lexicon for Artists at Work
5:00–8:00 pm

Join us for a conversation bridging two exciting projects. Celebrating the publication of Thinking from Black: A Lexicon by the Practicing Refusal Collective, the Studio Museum in Harlem will host a sonic activation reflecting on the expansive collection of words, terms, concepts, and ideas that takes the multiplicity of Black life as its point of departure in Thinking from Black: A Lexicon by the Practicing Refusal Collective. A Lexicon for Artists at Work features jazz saxophonist, Immanuel Wilkins and multimedia artist and composer, Will Johnson, and book contributors Phoebe Boswell (on gesture), Tina Campt (on frequency), Saidiya Hartman (on anarchy), and Deborah Thomas (on myal). This program invites visitors to experience what it sounds and feels like to “think from Black.”

The program will be followed by a conversation on what it means for artists to go to work right now and to create conditions that support their artistic practices. The panel features Terri Lyne Carrington, Staceyann Chin, Emil Kang, Esperanza Spalding, and Deborah Willis, and is moderated by Avery Willis Hoffman (Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre at University of Chicago and Artistic Advisor of the Toni Morrison Foundation). This conversation is curated in collaboration with Princeton Atelier and the Toni Morrison Foundation.

RSVP Required


Shop Thinking from Black: A Lexicon by the Practicing Refusal Collective at Studio Store!

Phoebe Boswell, born in Nairobi, Kenya, lives and works in London. She is a British/Kenyan multidisciplinary artist moving between drawing, painting, film, installation, sound, and writing, with a commitment to the drawn body, the decolonial body, the intimate and the collective body, and how it is seen, felt, loved, and cared for. She received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School at Rome in 2019, received the Lumière Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2021, and was Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer in residence. Her work is held and exhibited in public institutions globally.

Tina Campt is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archaeology and director of the Atelier at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997; Norton, 2022); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton, 2019), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Judy Grahn Prize for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the John Hope Franklin Prize. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019. She is University Professor at Columbia University and a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Literature.

Savannah Shange is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her book Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke UP, 2019) is an ethnography of the afterlife of slavery. She currently works in collaboration with organizers to document and amplify the practice of abolition in everyday life.

Deborah A. Thomas is the author of Exorbitance (2025), Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Exceptional Violence (2019), and Modern Blackness (2004), and co-editor of the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May. Prior to her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York–based Urban Bush Women.

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is Malcolm S. Forbes Professor in the
Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Brown Arts Institute
at Brown University. They are the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity; Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human; and Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology.

Immanuel Wilkins is an award-winning alto saxophonist and composer
who has toured extensively throughout the US, Canada, and Europe. His
albums include Omega (Blue Note, 2020) and The 7th Hand (Blue Note,
2022). His creative projects span both within and outside the world of
jazz, including collaborations with visual artists and filmmakers such as
Ja’Tovia Gary, Leslie Hewitt, and Theaster Gates.

William Johnson is a multimedia artist/composer from the Bronx, New
York City. Themes from his work include black digital memory, phantom
archives, and the latent poetics of audio engineer speak. He is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Sound Art/Composition and the McKnight Foundation’s Fellowship for Musicians.

Terri Lyne Carrington is a 2021 NEA Jazz Master, a 2019 Doris Duke Artist, a 2026 United States Artist Fellow, and a four-time Grammy Award–winning drummer, composer, producer, and educator. Carrington's vision for “Jazz Without Patriarchy” was the inspiration in founding the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice in 2018, which serves in supporting and sustaining a cultural transformation in jazz, with gender justice and racial justice as guiding principles. Carrington has performed on over 100 recordings with luminary artists, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz, Dianne Reeves, David Murray, John Scofield, Diana Krall, esperanza spalding, Cassandra Wilson, and countless others.

Emil J. Kang has spent three decades building, leading, and reimagining performing arts institutions across the United States. His work sits at the intersection of cultural strategy, philanthropy, and higher education, with a focus on how organizations evolve to better serve artists and communities. Most recently, Emil served as Program Director for Arts and Culture at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Previously, he founded Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, building it into one of the country’s leading university-based performing arts programs. Emil is Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Yale Ventures Cultural Innovation Lab and recently served as the Agnes Gund Visiting Professor of the Practice of Arts at Brown University. He has been a member of the National Council on the Arts since 2012, appointed by President Barack Obama, and serves as Vice Chair of the New York City Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission.

Staceyann Chin, a Poet, actor, and performing artist, is the author of the new poetry collection Crossfire: A Litany For Survival, the critically acclaimed memoir The Other Side of Paradise, cowriter and original performer in the Tony Award–winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, and author of the one-woman shows Hands Afire, Unspeakable Things, Border/Clash, and MotherStruck. She has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and 60 Minutes, and her poetry has been featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She proudly identifies as Caribbean, Black, Asian, lesbian, a woman, and a resident of New York City, as well as a Jamaican national.

esperanza spalding is an eaabibacliitoti* artist, trained and initiated in the North American (masculine) jazz lineage and tradition. Her work interweaves through various combinations of instrumental music, bass playing, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, regenerative agriculture, urban land & artist-sanctuary custodianship, and growing in love as a daughter, sister, cousin, niece, auntie, great-auntie, friend, while collaboratively decolonizing within and through her hometown community. She founded and Co-Directs Prismid Sanctuary, a non-profit that creates and stewards free artist residency, performance, and workshop space in Portland, Oregon (Prismid.org).

Deborah Willis, Ph.D, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has affiliated appointments with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural and the Institute of Fine Arts where she teaches courses on Photography & Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. She is also the director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture/Institute for African American Affairs. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, contemporary women photographers and beauty.

Avery Willis Hoffman, DPhil, is proud to join Court Theatre at University of Chicago as the new Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director. Avery recently served as inaugural Artistic Director, Brown Arts Institute and Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics at Brown University. Over the last two decades, she has curated multidisciplinary projects as inaugural Program Director at Park Avenue Armory, led content development for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History, managed Avery Productions, and produced multiple artistic collaborations with director Peter Sellars. A Marshall Scholar, Avery earned a DPhil and MSt in Classical Languages and Literature from University of Oxford, and a BA in Classics and English from Stanford University.