Uwazi Zamani

Multidisciplinary Performance Artist · Choreographer · Sound Designer

I work across movement, live sound, and poetry to explore Black interior life and the conditions that shape how we inhabit the world.

Uwazi Zamani (he/him/they/them) is a Black queer multidisciplinary performance artist, choreographer, and sound designer from Houston, Texas. His/their work brings the body into relation with live sound and storytelling, drawing on Black queer performance archives that carry urgency and resistance. Through performance, Uwazi reclaims space and bends time, making the spectral echoes of Black life felt in the present. Uwazi earned 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. They hold an MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts and are a doctoral candidate in Dance at Temple University. Their scholarship and artistic practice meet in an investigation of the political poetics of Black being as it emerges through movement and sound.

Their performance career began in 2010 with Urban Souls Dance Company, under the artistic direction of Harrison Guy; where Uwazi would collaborate and perform for 9 years. Since then, Uwazi has collaborated with choreographers including Kevin Wynn, Bill T. Jones, Dorrell Martin, Elijah Gibson, Stephanie Martinez, and Charles O. Anderson. They have also served as a research consultant and dramaturg for Tommie-Waheed Evans and waheedworks, and as a sound designer for St. Louis Dance Theater, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company, PHILADANCO!, Drexel University, Ursinus College, and Swarthmore College.

Uwazi is the inaugural recipient of the 2026 Toni Pierce-Sands Choreographic Initiative and a 2026–2027 Schomburg Center Research Fellow. Their honors also include the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dance Research Fellowship (2025–2026), the William Penn Foundation Award for Arts and Culture (2025), the Edrie Ferdun Emerging Scholar in Dance Award from Temple University (2025), and the Ann and Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship from Jacob’s Pillow (2024). Across their work, Uwazi treats performance as a practice of world-making, insisting on the presence and possibility of Black queer life and larger conversations on the human condition.