Join the FHI Social Practice Lab for a presentation by choreographer and curator Rashida Bumbray.
Rashida Bumbray is a curator and choreographer living and working in New York. She is currently guest curator at Creative Time for the public art exhibition Funk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, on view September-October 2014. From 2006 to 2011, Bumbray was Associate Curator at The Kitchen, where she organized several critically acclaimed projects and commissions, including solo exhibitions by Leslie Hewitt, Simone Leigh, Adam Pendleton, and Mai Thu Perret as well as performances by Derrick Adams, Sanford Biggers, Kalup Linzy, and Mendi & Keith Obadike among others. Bumbray has commissioned new-music concert works at The Kitchen by such artists as Alicia Hall-Moran, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Marc Cary and Guillermo E. Brown and dance works by Kyle Abraham, Camille A. Brown and Jason Samuels Smith. Bumbray began her career as Curatorial Assistant and Exhibition Coordinator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she co-founded the ongoing lobby sound installation StudioSound and Hoofers’ House, a monthly jam session for tap dancers—now called Shim Sham. At the Studio Museum she coordinated major exhibitions, including Energy Experimentation: African-American Artists 1964–1980, with Kellie Jones. Bumbray has published texts on various topics pertaining to contemporary art, Africana studies and comparative literature. Bumbray earned her BA in African American Studies and Theater & Dance from Oberlin College and her MA in Africana Studies from New York University with a focus on Contemporary Art and Performance Studies. Her choreographic work, Run Mary Run, was on The New York Times’ list of Best Concerts for 2012 and was most recently performed as part of Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran’s BLEED at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Bumbray is a recipient of the Harlem Stage Fund for New Work, and was nominated for a Bessie: NY Dance and Performance Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer for her work Little Red Rooster in a Red House.
