Kemi Adeyemi (she/her)

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Kemi Adeyemi is Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Her practice use art and performance as sites and methodologies for theorizing the contours of contemporary black queer life. Kemi's arts writing manual, Writing About Black Art, won a 2023 Arts Writers Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation, and it is under contract with Duke University Press. She also wrote Feels Right: Black Queer Women & the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-edited Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021) with Kareem Khubchandani and Ramón Rivera-Servera. Her recent writing has appeared in GLQ, Women & Performance, and in the Routledge Handbook of African American Art History.

As Director of The Black Embodiments Studio, Adeyemi runs an arts writing incubator, public programming initiative, and publication platform dedicated to developing discourse around contemporary black art and artists—which is to say that Kemi's work often extends into the realm of contemporary art practice. She often writers for exhibition catalogues including, most recently, for artists including Arnold J. Kemp, Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger, and Alex Da Corte. She worked for several years as choreographer Will Rawls’ dramaturge for [siccer]; her writing about "black dramaturgy" appeared in Movement Research Performance Journal and still more will be published in the project's forthcoming book. Kemi curated Amina Ross’ 2019 solo show at Ditch Projects, and co-curated Unstable Objects in 2017 at the Alice Gallery.