ABOUT

Sister James (they/them) is a research-based artist, writer, and educator based between Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, New York and the homeland of the Wabanaki/South Portland, Maine. They create site-responsive, socially engaged, and participatory performances, rituals, and installations, drawing on oral history, archival research, and transdisciplinary collaborations. As a queer, trans artist with a disability, they are interested in the ways that gender and sexuality, time and memory, the senses, and movement are shaped by political and legal structures, science and technology, and the environment. They use performance to explore embodiment, collectivity/relationality, de/materialization and transformation as strategies for revealing and reimagining violent systems, logics and histories, expanding the limits of being and being together. 

Their work has been supported by the MAP Fund, a scholar residency with the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Arts Festival, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), and the New England Humanities Consortium. Their publications can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, the edited anthologies Queer Nightlife and Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation, and the scholarly journals Women and Performance: a Journal of feminist theory, Text and Performance Quarterly, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies among others. They received their PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and are currently Assistant Professor of Contemporary Performance at Colby College.