Uwazi Zamani is a celebrated Black queer multidisciplinary performance artist, choreographer, and sound designer from Houston, Texas. A visionary force in contemporary performance, Uwazi conjures worlds where movement, sound, and storytelling collide—where Black queer and trans archives of performance pulse with urgency, resistance, and radical beauty. Their work is an embodied manifesto, reclaiming space, bending time, and amplifying the spectral echoes of Black queer life.

With a BFA in Dance Performance and a BA in African and African Diaspora Studies (with emphases in Black Performance Theory and Black Queer Studies) from The University of Texas at Austin, Uwazi’s scholarship is as rich and layered as their artistic practice. They hold an MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts and are currently a second-year doctoral student and teaching fellow in Dance at Temple University, where they continue their deep investigation into movement, sound, and the political poetics of Black being.

Uwazi’s performance career spans collaborations with some of the most compelling choreographers of our time, including Kevin Wynn, Steven Iannacone, Dorrell Martin, Elijah Gibson, Stephanie Martinez, Iquail Shaheed, and Charles O. Anderson. Their journey began in 2011 as a member of Urban Souls Dance Company under the direction of Harrison Guy, grounding their artistic voice in a lineage of Black movement innovation. Beyond the stage, they have shaped dance’s intellectual and sonic landscapes, serving as a research consultant and dramaturg for Tommie-Waheed Evans and waheedworks and designing sound for St. Louis Dance Theater under Kirven Douthit-Boyd’s artistic direction.

Uwazi’s choreographic vision has been honored with the Houston Arts Alliance Support for Artists and Creative Individuals grant, the Let Creativity Happen! Grant, the 2023 University of the Arts Creative Research and Innovation Grant, and the prestigious 2024 Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship from Jacob’s Pillow—affirming their place as a vanguard of contemporary Black queer performance.

With each creation, Uwazi stretches the limits of what performance can hold—melding body, sound, and spirit to evoke the ecstatic, the haunted, and the rebellious. Their work is an unapologetic act of world-building, an offering of Black queer futurity, and an insistence on transformation through the power of embodied storytelling. Uwazi does not simply make work—they conjure, disrupt, and reimagine, crafting a performance vocabulary that refuses erasure and demands to be seen, heard, and felt.