Okwui Okpokwasili

Okwui Okpokwasili (/ˈoʊkwi oʊkˈpoʊkwəsɪli/; born August 6, 1972) is a Nigerian-American artist, actress, performer, choreographer, and writer. Her multidisciplinary performances draw upon her training in theatre, and she describes her work as at "the intersection of theatre, dance, and the installation." Okpokwasili is known for appearing as Vertigo in the television miniseries Agatha All Along.
Several of her works relate to historical events in Nigeria. She is especially interested in cultural and historical memory and how the Western imagination perceives African bodies.
Okpokwasili was born August 6, 1972 in The Bronx, New York, daughter of Igbo Nigerian immigrants who moved to the United States to escape the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s. She attended Yale University, where she met filmmaker Andrew Rossi, who made a documentary about her piece Bronx Gothic.
Okpokwasili has become a key figure in the New York experimental dance scene. She is known for several one-woman performances and for her frequent collaborations with Ralph Lemon and Peter Born, her husband. Born often directs and designs the lighting and staging for Okpokwasili's performances.
She is also known for her role in the music video for the Jay-Z song "4:44", from the album of the same name.
In April 2017, she performed at Mass MOCA, responding to Nick Cave's massive installation work Until with a site-specific dance. The performance was co-sponsored by Jacob's Pillow dance center; choreographer Bill T. Jones performed earlier in the series of artists responding to Cave's installation.
She played the part of KK in Josephine Decker's 2018 film, Madeline's Madeline.
In a theatrical role, Okpokwasili performed the part of Hippolyta in Julie Taymor's 2013 production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
In 2023, Okpokwasili starred in The Exorcist: Believer alongside Leslie Odom Jr.
In 2024, Okpokwasili played Vertigo of the Salem's Seven in Agatha All Along.
This was her first collaborative piece with her husband Born. She won a 2010 New York Dance Award and a 2009 Performance Bessie Award for Outstanding Production. Centering on a mother and daughter, the work considered cultural and generational clashes.
In this 90-minute one-woman semi-autobiographical performance which she also choreographed, Okpokwasili plays two young black girls talking about growing up, feeling vulnerable, and discovering sexuality. As the audience enters, she is already on the stage and is trembling in a dark slip. Eventually, she begins to speak the dialogue of the two girls in conversation.
The work is the subject of a documentary by Andrew Rossi that shares the title of the performance work. The film illuminates the process of creating the work; includes clips of Okpokwasili answering questions from the audience when she toured the piece, and candid discussions with her husband about race; and features her parents and their reaction to her art. Cultural critic Hilton Als praised this piece in a 2017 review of Poor People's TV Room. The piece was commissioned by Danspace Project and Performance Space 122 in 2014.
A group performance involving seven female performers singing, speaking, and dancing, this work was staged in the underground magazine of Fort Jay at Governors Island in July 2016 as part of The River to River Festival. This performance included fragments of research on Nigerian history as it relates to women's bodies that were used to develop Poor People's TV Room. During the two-hour duration of the performance, the audience was permitted to move through the space of the military cavern, while the performers moved throughout the installation spaces. The work was commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
This work considers the subject of women's resistance movements in Nigeria, specifically the Women's War in 1929, when the country was under British rule, and the kidnapping of 300 schoolgirls in 2014 by Boko Haram. As part of this project, Okpokwasili also researched the film industry in Nigeria, known as Nollywood, considering representations of women in a cinema where African and Western cultures intersect.
In an interview with Jenn Joy for Bomb magazine, Okpokwasili stated that the piece "is about a critical absence that I feel when a tragedy happens—like the kidnapping of girls by Boko Haram and the Women's War in Nigeria. My work is not explicitly about the incredible women in northern Nigeria who came together to shame their government into doing something to get these 300 abducted girls back. African women are not just victims of colonizers and oppressive or corrupt governments. They have been building collectives and advocating and fighting to be visible for a long time. I don’t want to make documentary work—but I don’t want these women to disappear, either. My piece is about visibility."
She has cited as a major influence the Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola, who is known for incorporating elements of Yoruba folklore into his works.
The research Okpokwasili completed for Poor People's TV Room also informed Sitting on a Man’s Head, a work the artist presented at the 2018 Berlin Biennale.
Okpokwasili has received several Bessie Awards for her performances, including works she has written and developed herself. In 2018, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, a prestigious "Genius Award" intended to enable recipients to further develop their talent.
Projects are feature films unless otherwise noted.