Fri April 26th Open 11 AM–5 PM
Ayodele Nzinga
2020 YBCA 100 Honoree
Ayodele Nzinga is an arts & culture theoretician/practitioner working at the intersections of cultural production, community development, and community well-being to foster transformation in marginalized communities. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing and Consciousness and Doctorate of Philosophy in Transformative Education & Change. A renaissance woman, Ayodele is a producing director, playwright, poet, dramaturg, actress, performance consultant, arts educator, community advocate, and culture-bearing anchor. She is the founder of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc. and BAMBD CDC; a producer of BAMBDFEST; a Cal-Shakes Artist Investigator Alumni; a Helen Crocker Russell Arts Leadership Fellow; a member of the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame; recognized by Theater Bay Area as one of the 40 people who changed the face of Bay Area theater; recognized by the August Wilson House as the only director in the world to direct the complete August Wilson Century Cycle in chronological order.
More on YBCA for Ayodele Nzinga
Public Programs
Interactive Studio Hours with the YBCA 10 Artists
Saturday, October 16, 2021, 12–4:30 PM
“When I discovered the power in words, was when I began to take the idea of making art and make worlds and understand that’s what it was – world making – that it was powerful. Really, really powerful.”
YBCA 10 Project
Ayodele Nzinga’s creative prototype The Offering will take form as a three-part performance, multimedia visual installation, and digital catalog. The performance, MegaVerses, engages the narrative past of the space that is YBCA, the moment in which we find humanity, and entertains the thought of 500 year prayers to an uncertain future. The installation, The WatchTower, interrogates the degrees of gaze; who is looking, who is seen, who is unseen, where is the power in watching/gaze/seeing. The digital catalogue, The (un)Reliable Narrator, is an inverted museum catalog where the installations talk to the institution, are deconstructed by a voice that centers it’s own gaze, and invites others into the conversation of meaning, value, and a prayer for tomorrow(s).
The Offering, is a triptych that uses orality, visual language, and text to interrogate narratives of climate and social injustice framed by conquest, colonialism, and capitalism to inform the imagining of human survival on the blue ball.