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.

✦

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.

✦

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

✦

The Dark Matter Residency is supported by a generous grant from the Joyce Foundation, with additional support from the Reva and David Logan Foundation and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation

apply for Dark Matter REsidency 2025 !

The 2025 Dark Matter Residency Application window opens Thursday, Feb. 13th! 

Repeat applicants are welcome! 

Applications are due Monday, March 17th, 2025.

  • Please review the guidelines before applying:

Do you have QuestioNS about the Residency?

For questions or more information on this year’s residency or application process, view our latest 2025 info session with potential applicants, the Dark Matter Residency Committee, and Dark Matter Resident Alumni!

Please email dmresidency@elasticarts.org with questions.

Hear it from them

Click on the videos to hear the perspectives of our Dark Matter Alumni Residents.

2020-21 Dark Matter Residency Cohorts:

Sojourner Zenobia,

Elijah Jamal Asani,

Katrina Brook-Flores,

Shannon Harris, Mojdeh Stoakley,

Kwabena Foli,

Margaret M. Morris

Spotlight:

2022 Dark Matter Resident

Naydja Bruton

2024 Dark Matter Residency Cohort:

Zahra Baker, Leah Lara,

Amyna Love, Nikki Patin

& sun Lynn Hunter

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.

Follow the Dark Matter Residency on social media

The Dark Matter Residency is funded in part by generous support from the Joyce Foundation and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation