Artists

For the past decade, Zimbabwean choreographer Nora Chipaumire has been investigating Africa and discovering her personal iconography via objects and sounds that define place: stones, tennis shoes, ululations, whistles, and bare light bulbs. Chipaumire interrogates the concept of the African female body as subjugated, colonial, tribal, and unknowable by constructing theatrical worlds and self-portraits of agency and power. She is the recipient of a 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2011 USA Ford Fellow, and has garnered two New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies): in 2008 for her dance-theater work Chimurenga, and in 2007 for her body of work with Urban Bush Women, where she was a featured performer for six years (2003-2008) and served as associate artistic director from 2007 to 2008. Her works include The Last Heifer (2012); I Ka Nye (You Look Good) (2010), created and performed with choreographer Souleymane Badolo and musician Obo Addy; and lions will roar, swans will fly, angels will wrestle heaven, rains will break, gurkurahundi (2009), created and performed with legendary Zimbabwean musician Thomas Mapfumo. Chipaumire's oeuvre has been widely presented nationally and internationally.