Bio + Statement

I trace my earliest creative impulse to a surrender to sound. Singing and songwriting eventually led me to poetry, fueled by commitment to an aesthetic imagination enamored with visuality.

Today, as an artist and scholar, the work I do is a response to calls whenever they make themselves known. In the last three decades, I have criss-crossed the interstices and borders of art, humanities and social sciences. Every invitation I have accepted has required facing the histories and legacies of the sites of our gathering. With deference and humility, I call on the ancestors asking for passage. I remain determined to confront the visceral, often absent in the structural. In my practice, I use and play with a multitude of forms stemming from an organic approach to rasanblaj (a gathering of ideas, things, people, spirits).

I commune with the dead and the living. I am fluid at remixing natural and sacred objects, archived and contemporary histories, narratives and theories often with popular songs, laced with Vodou chants. With performance, I access/face our collective dehumanization to be with the present however ephemeral. My aim is to recreate a fully integrated being more conscientious about our entangled place in the world.

Gina Athena Ulysse is based in Santa Cruz, California where she is professor of Humanities at UCSC. A photographer, poet, chanteuse, and a cultural anthropologist who is always writing something, she has presented her works in numerous colleges, and universities nationally and internationally. She has also performed in artistic venues including: The Bowery, Brecht Forum, The British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Court Theatre, Gorki Theatre, House of World Cultures in Berlin, LaMaMa, Lyric Stage Theatre, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, MoMA Salon, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia among others. In 2020, she was invited to the Biennale of Sydney.

In these times, she’s engaged in a RedwoodsRasanblaj.

“You’ve been doing a rasanblaj your whole life.”

—Dr. Kyrah Malika Daniels