ARIELLE JULIA BROWN

VISITING ARTIST

In Spring 2020, the Center for Experimental Ethnography is co-sponsoring visiting artist Arielle Julia Brown. Brown is a cultural producer and social and civic practice theatre artist. 

​During her residence, Brown will continue developing her work Fallawayinto, a performance installation about Donna Booker, a Black trans woman activist. Concurrently, she will spend time developing the second iteration of Black Spatial Relics, a residency program for performance makers about slavery, justice and freedom. Brown will also mentor undergraduate students working at the intersection of slavery and gender studies, and present her work at an APC seminar. 

Brown is interested in how cultural institutions and arts initiatives can facilitate social justice and cultural equity through the championing of culturally specific performance. ​

Photo of Arielle Julia Brown

Emerging from her work and research around U.S. slavery, racial terror and justice, Brown is committed to supporting and creating Black performance work that commands imaginative and material space for social transformation. In service of this work, Brown’s practice is necessarily multidisciplinary as it traverses cultural producing, cultural strategy, performance making, dramaturgy, public history and performance curation. Brown has received various awards and fellowships for her work. She is most recently a 2018 MAP Fund awardee for her collaborative work, Remember2019.

Above text reproduced from original Penn SAS announcement here.

 Arielle’s work and writing on Black political performance has been published in the anthology Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines, ARTS.BLACK and Public Art Dialogue and others. Arielle was a 2017-2018 Diversity and Leadership Fellow with Alliance of Artists Communities, a 2019 Monument Lab National Fellow, and she serves as a cultural planning consultant for the Penn and Slavery Project at the University of Pennsylvania. Recent dramaturgical credits include Grounds That Shout! And Others Merely Shaking (Fist and Heel Performance Group, Partners for Sacred Places and Philadelphia Contemporary) 2019 and SaltPepperKetchup (InterACT Theatre) 2018.