For nearly twenty years, choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili and director/designer Peter Born (sweat variant) have created singular performances centering Black womanhood that exist at the edge of dance, theater, and installation. This lineage continues in adaku, part 2: she shivers with it, the second installment of a speculative trilogy following a precolonial family ensnared in the transatlantic slave trade. Boldly imagined and inventively staged by Born, Okpokwasili and a cast of dancers enact the story of a young woman in a near-future United States. She has been told she has no history worth remembering — until a revelation cracks that open, unleashing questions of ritual and repair.
About the artists
Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, actor, choreographer, and writer. Okpokwasili has earned numerous accolades, including a 2025 Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. Okpokwasili was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist. She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022, and an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023. She continues to collaborate with Ralph Lemon, Kevin Beasley, Saidiya Hartman, and Kaneza Schaal, among other artists.
Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation. In collaboration with Okpokwasili, Born’s work has been featured in the Berlin Biennale, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum, Witch Hunt at the Hammer Museum, Loophole of Retreat: Venice, and Sex Ecologies at Kunsthall Trondheim, as well as performance work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum; MASS MoCA; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; and ICA Boston; among others. He is the recipient of four New York Dance Performance Awards (Bessie Awards). His work as an art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estee Lauder, Barney’s Co-op, Bloomingdales, Old Navy, 25 Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and No Strings Puppet Productions.
adaku, part 2 is commissioned by Aspen Art Museum, The Wexner Center for the Arts, and Yale Schwarzman Center as lead commissioners, and is co-commissioned by the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN). adaku, part 2 is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by ASU Gammage, CAP UCLA, DiverseWorks, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Walker Art Center, and NPN. For more information www.npnweb.org. adaku, part 2 was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and The Mellon Foundation. adaku, part 2 is also supported by the Harkness Foundation for Dance. Thank you to the J.E. Commission Fund and David Thomson for additional support for the development of adaku, part 2.
