Nia O. Witherspoon(Smith BA/Stanford PhD) is a Black queer multidisciplinary artist + healing justice practitioner investigating the metaphysics of black liberation, desire, and diaspora, as they track across the space-time continuum. A forever student and practitioner of African cosmologies, and combining Black feminism,eco-feminism, and auto-critogrophy with mediums in writing, performance, sound, and installation, Witherspoon creates portals for communion, witnessing, and healing. Current and recent works include: Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple to Pleasure + Wisdom School (HERE Art Center/Musical Theatre Factory, 2024), Chronicle X: The Dark Girl Chronicles (The Shed, 2021), and MESSIAH (La Mama, 2019).

She is a recipient of NEFA/NTP, NPN Creation + Touring Fund, and NYSCA, as well as having been a Creative Capital Awardee, a Jerome New Artist Fellow, a current artist in residence at HERE Art Center and Musical Theatre Factory, and former resident at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange + New York Theatre Workshop. Her work has been or will be featured by The Shed, BRIC, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Joe’s Pub, HERE, JACK, La Mama ETC, Playwright’s Realm, Links Hall, National Black Theatre, Brava Theatre, BAAD, Movement Research, BAX, Dixon Place, Painted Bride, 651 Arts, and elsewhere. Her writing is published in the Journal of Popular Culture; Imagined Theatres; Women and Collective Creation; and IMANIMAN: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands.

Follow her @niasoli on Instagram to stay up to date.

PROJECT : PRIESTESS OF TWERK

Priestess of Twerk is a spa, a temple and a performance that merges African Traditional religious approaches to healing and Black feminist theologies to both envision and enact a more evolved world. In this work, several women and femmes who have gone through black feminist monastic training preside over an interactive temple and spa that embraces of all radical forms of femme agency, including womb health, creativity expression, dreamwork, sacred sexuality, and gender affirmation. The goal of this work is to create a space where Black Femme mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health is prioritized and honored on our own terms This is a space of ceremony, of training and education, of creativity (live music and theatrical performance) and of restoration (radical rest, baths and saunas). It is an intervention in both theatre/performance spaces which encourage passive spectatorship as well as in wellness spaces which often center around capitalism and decontextualized practice.

Imagine this. Upon entering the sacred space abundant with flowing waters, tropical flowers, and soft, earthy fabrics, participants will be greeted by Twerk Priestesses in erotic/holy regalia. They will then be cleansed and outfitted before going for an individual divination where they will receive their own tailored map for how they should move through the temple, based on the healing that they need. In addition to saunas, baths, and altars dedicated to different goddesses, the medicinal spaces participants may be prescribed include: Dream Chamber, Birth Chamber, Gender Affirmation Chamber, Menses Chamber, Erotica Chamber, and Flora Chamber. In this temple, there are also shrines dedicated to Black feminist patron saints: Octavia, both Tonis, Audre, June, bell, Alice, etc. The temple experience unfolds into a concert which itself unfolds into a play which retells the story of the re-unification of Isis and her twin sister in the Underworld, inspiring us to confront our shadow selves. In this way, we undo, with our bodies, what has been done to our bodies.