About

Naima Lowe is Black queer disabled writer and artist who creates films, performances and texts using improvisational and collaborative strategies. She earned her BA from Brown University and MFA from Temple University where she was a Student Academy Award Finalist for her experimental nonfiction film Birthmarks. Birthmarks also won Best Experimental Film at The Newark Black Film Festival, Best Sound Design at the NextFrame International Student Film Festival and in 2020 received the Duke University Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Awards, where it is now part of the permanent collection. 
Naima’s screenings and exhibitions include Anthology Film Archive, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Wing Luke Museum, MiX Experimental Film Festival, National Queer Art Festival, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and the Henry Art Gallery. Naima’s essays, poetry and artist books have been published by The Encyclopedia Project, Sound American Magazine, and Walls Divide Press. Her artist’s book “39 Questions For White People” is held in the permanent collections of Harvard University Library, Franklin and Marshall College, The University of Buffalo, among many community based and institutional rare books libraries. Naima has held artist residency fellowships at the Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Other recent accolades and exhibitions include Endless Editions Biennial New York, NY, CoCa UN(Contained) Center for Contemporary Art, Seattle WA, Art 365 - Oklahoma Triennial Small Group Exhibition and Concept: Focus - Oklahoma Triennial Contemporary Art Exhibition and Regional Artist Exchange. 
Naima was a 2021-2022 Mid America Arts Alliance Interchange Artist Fellow, recipient of the 2022-23 Mid America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovation Award, and a recipient of a 2022 Jazz Road Creative Residency. In 2020, Naima launched her independent art and design imprint Trial and Error and since 2021 has been a Community Coordinator for the online writing community at Louis Place. Naima resides in Tulsa, within the Muscogee Creek Nation Reservation, where she spends her time being free and talking to animals.

Artist’s Statement

I make performances, writing and videos concerned with love, sex and desire, using my body and lived experience as points of departure. I engage with autobiographical material rigorously and speculatively, crafting complex narrative worlds with linguistic virtuosity that I embody vocally, musically and through subtly crafted visual choreography and gesture. I use my body’s trained and natural movement to explore visual and cultural legibility and “correctness.” This is also a love language; being visibly present on screen or stage in a non-normative body requires a lot of self regard. 

My work is imbued with ritual and music, and is always steeped in the liberatory ethos of improvisation. Improvisation, within the Black musical tradition, embraces tensions between collective vision and individual creativity to create opportunities for liberatory praxis with, for and among artists and audiences. My commitment to improvisation is necessarily inclusive of cultivating and nurturing relationships of mutual aid and community care, forging meaningful commitments of co-accountability with other artists and arts workers, and being in right relationship with my peers, comrades and friends within anti-facist, Disability Justice, and Abolitionist movements.

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