The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Affiliate Artist
Arielle Julia Brown is a cultural producer and social and civic practice theatre artist. During her residence, Brown will continue developing her work Fallawayinto, a performance installation about Donna Booker, a Black trans woman activist. Concurrently, she will spend time developing the second iteration of Black Spatial Relics, a residency program for performance makers about slavery, justice and freedom. Brown will also mentor undergraduate students working at the intersection of slavery and gender studies, and present her work at an APC seminar. Brown is interested in how cultural institutions and arts initiatives can facilitate social justice and cultural equity through the championing of culturally specific performance. Emerging from her work and research around U.S. slavery, racial terror and justice, Brown is committed to supporting and creating Black performance work that commands imaginative and material space for social transformation. In service of this work, Brown’s practice is necessarily multidisciplinary as it traverses cultural producing, cultural strategy, performance making, dramaturgy, public history and performance curation. Brown has received various awards and fellowships for her work. She is most recently a 2018 MAP Fund awardee for her collaborative work, Remember2019.
Brown was a Visiting Artist in 2019-2020 through the generous support of Sach Program for Arts Innovation, Center for Experimental Ethnography, Trustees’ Council of Penn Women,and the Penn Slavery Project and she is currently an Affiliate Artist.