Gabrielle Civil
black feminist performance artist
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty original performance art works around the world, including her year-long project “In & Out of Place” as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico and her “Fugue” trilogy after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Since May 2014, she has been performing “Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” as an act of embodied remembering. Her writing has appeared in Small Axe, Art21, Something on Paper, Kitchen Table Translation, Obsidian, and other publications. She is the author of two memoirs in performance art: Swallow the Fish and Experiments in Joy. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and serves as Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.
