Event Details

Gabrielle Civil, a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer will present “ghost gestures.” In this dynamic artist talk, Gabrielle Civil will explore black diaspora grief and transformation in her practice as a black feminist performance artist. She will reflect on bloodlines, heritage translation, and ancestral return, paying special attention to her Fugue Trilogy created after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. She will show how performance “ghost gestures” can become a way to embody the past and welcome the future.

Gabrielle Civil has premiered fifty performance works around the world and her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019) and ghost gestures (2021). Her writing has also appeared in Dancing While Black, Kitchen Table Translation, New Daughters of Africa, and Black in the Middle. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University with an emphasis on diasporic black women’s writing. A 2019 Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging Artist, she currently teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space. www.gabriellecivilartist.com.  For zoom link, please contact Theresa Klauer ([email protected]).