Ogemdi Ude
I am a Brooklyn-based dance, theater, and interdisciplinary artist creating performances, texts, installation, and media that focus on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. I use movement and voice as a tool for digging up personal and sociocultural narratives, and processing grief. I am interested in how we search for objective “truth” to justify grief; why we seek evidence of our relationships to that which we have lost. How do we find people, cultures, and histories that aren’t there anymore in all the bits that are? I engage the body holistically to re-member: sew together the fissures that trauma creates in our personal narratives.
I work to ensure the wellness of Black, brown, femme and queer communities. This extends to my work as a doula, where I offer critical intervention in the high death rates of birthing people and babies by providing hands on support before, during, and after labor and delivery.
My work has been presented at The Kitchen, Harlem Stage, BRIC, Abrons Arts Center, ISSUE Project Room, Danspace Project, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, Lewis Center for the Arts, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. I have worked with artists including Raja Feather Kelly, iele paloumpis, Shariffa Ali, Marion Spencer, Rebecca Lazier, Stuart Singer, Aaron Landsman, Melanie Lane, Prue Lang, Raven White/BIRDHOUSE, Oskar Eustis, Laurie Woolery, and Lear deBessonet.
I am a 2024-2025 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist-in-Residence. I have been a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2022-2023 Smack Mellon Studio Artist, 2022 Center for Performance Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 I appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University.
Press and Publications
Brooklyn Rail: When the Artists Write the History Books
IMPRESSIONS: Rena Anakwe, ms. z tye and Ogemdi Ude at The Kitchen's Dance and Process
Watch Me in Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study
Cover of Dance Magazine's 25 to Watch
IMPRESSIONS: Harlem Stage Presents "E-Moves 2023," Curated by Stefanie Batten Bland
Making Dance Out Of Survival Skills and Reckoning With Grief by Gia Kourlas for the New York Times
Princeton Alumni Weekly: Ogemdi Ude ’16 Turns Grief Into Joy Through Dance
Ogemdi Ude with Lauren Wingenroth for The Brooklyn Rail
Ogemdi Ude in Conversation with Sydney King: “I Don't Think I Ever Want A Body to Be Embalmed”
Jehan Roberson | Ever Present and In Process: Breathing and Grieving with Ogemdi Ude and Sydney King
"What’s After the Afrofuture?" Ogemdi Ude for 3 Views Theater
"With Intent" Ogemdi Ude for Imagining: A Gibney Journal
Danspace Project Journal: Ogemdi Ude in Conversation with Assistant Curator Seta Morton
Support
I am a fiscally sponsored artist with Brooklyn Arts Exhange.
Your contribution helps support my process and future performances.
All donations are fully tax deductible.
Upcoming
Major (work in progress)
New York Live Arts Live Artery Festival
January 11, 2025 at 3pm