Steffani Jemison: Open Rehearsal Artist-in-Residence

Presented by the Arts Research Center in collaboration with BAMPFA

October 28 - November 2, 2026

Young Black woman in an “AIR” graphic T-shirt stands calmly in a bright white room with wood floors beside a folding worktable.

Steffani Jemison by JaLeel Marques Porcha

Schedule:

Performance: Steffani Jemison and Leslie Cuyjet on Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi

Saturday, Oct 31st at 1pm | BAMPFA Galleries

free with entrance, more info at bampfa.org

NORTH STAR: A Movement Workshop

Monday, Nov 2nd from 10am-12pm | Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex D23

free with registration, register here
open to all, no movement experience required

About the Artist:

Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. In dialogue with interlocutors (living and ancestral), her work connects mark-making, gesture, projection, movement, and document. In 2026, her work is included in solo and group exhibitions at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, FR; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, DE; the Moody Center, Houston, TX; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Buffalo AKG, Buffalo, NY; and the Carpenter Center, Cambridge, MA; among other venues. Jemison’s work is part of many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Jemison’s novella A Rock, A River, A Street was published by Primary Information in 2022. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Design at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

NORTH STAR: A Movement Workshop

"you begin underneath all that concrete,

down inside corridors, labyrinthine”

—Quincy Troupe, "moving toward the open, toward the light"

About the workshop: Where are you; where am I? How do we orient ourselves in relation to one another? In dialogue with the children’s game “Marco Polo”—in which players with closed eyes orient themselves in response to sound and voice—artist Steffani Jemison will lead participants through a series of playful prompts connecting perspective, movement, language, and relation through guided improvisation. Gameplay will be preceded by a somatic warm-up and will integrate theory, fiction, and poetry; references may include Dionne Brand and Tyrone S. Palmer alongside Quincy Troupe. The workshop is suitable for anyone interested in testing contact, entanglement, and antagonism through lived experience; it might resonate particularly with creative writers, theorists, and performing artists.

Physical movement in this workshop is adaptable to all bodies and physical capacities; no movement experience required. Come as you are.

Contemporary dancers perform an energetic movement piece in a gallery, surrounded by seated spectators watching intently.

Performance of Cynosure by Steffani Jemison, JaLeel Marques Porcha & Andros Zins-Browne at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Lafayette Anticipations. Photography: Eloïse Yapo.

About the Open Rehearsal Artist-in-Residence Program:

Over the next three years, the ARC will welcome artists who consider their making a mode of thought, and scholars whose thinking emerges from a practice, all experimenting with what research can look like when it is made rather than written.

Each residency is shaped with the artist, following where their work and interests lead, unfolding across performances, workshops, and conversations on process. Residents return over three years, part of a shared project that holds them in each other's orbit and in that of practitioners across campus. In 2029, a festival gathers the AIRs, working groups, and the wider communities.

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Topics

AIR topic page