Dark Matter Residency

The Dark Matter Residency supports emerging artists whose work challenges the hegemonic hierarchies of race through performance and visual representation. The Residency provides artists with a flexible, functional space for the development and presentation of new work, a robust professional network, professional development, mentorship, and financial support.

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The Residency serves Chicago-based, performing artists from a diverse range of performing arts disciplines including (but not limited to) music, performance art, dance, drama, poetry, film, multimedia, and puppetry.

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Residents perform in Dark Matter Series events, in Community Outreach events, in AfroFuturist Weekend, as well as other Elastic programs throughout the year.

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The Dark Matter Residency is supported in part by a generous grant from the Joyce Foundation

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MEET THE 2024 DARK MATTER RESIDENTS

A chi-town hidden jewel, Amyna Love is a classically trained, independent artist with a range of musical influences such as Paramore, Lianne la Havas and Ella Fitzgerald. Her alternative sound is a fusion of punk and soul sprinkled with the African influences of her upbringing. Love has opened for artists such as Goapele and Maimouna Youssef (Mumu Fresh).

Leah Lara is a black nonbinary puppeteer and 3-D illustrator from Dallas Tx. Their work often investigates the black femme experience while drawing on dark and whimsical fairy tale archetypes and themes, utilizing fairytales as a way to reexamine social structures, behaviors, social hierarchies, and biases. They love working with their hands, and stick to the commitment of writing, designing, and performing one original puppet show a year.

Louisiana born creative, Zahra Glenda Baker has been a Chicago based vocalist, storyteller and teaching artist for the past 35 years. Zahra has explored vocal improvisation, spirituals and deep trance healing meditations. communal song styles, overtones, throat singing, yodeling and other mysteries inside the voice to interpret the range of the human experience. With a combined curiosity of sound and a burning desire to place physical, emotional, and spiritual liberation at the center, Zahra continues to pursue a personal and collective journey toward well-being

Featured in The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader, and on international television and radio, multidisciplinary artist Nikki Patin has been writing since she was 7. In 2014, Patin addressed the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on behalf of Black women and girl survivors of sexual violence. Nikki Patin holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine, is the Founder and Executive Producer for Surviving the Mic and the Program Director for the Resident Association of Greater Englewood. Patin’s memoir, Working on Me, was recently released on Vine Leaves Press.

sun Lynn Hunter is a captivating multimedia artist and researcher based out of Baltimore & Chicago. Through endurance-based performances, sound art, interactive installations & public workshops, sun delves into the profound realms of empathy & vulnerability, threading the nuances of grief, joy, isolation & love within the Black experience. Her embodied performance art becomes a powerful act of resistance, using the body as a vessel to challenge the colonial gaze.