uwazi zamani (he/him/they/them) is a celebrated Black queer multidisciplinary performance artist, choreographer, and sound designer from hot Houston, Texas! A visionary force in contemporary performance, Uwazi conjures worlds where movement, sound, and storytelling collide and where Black queer and archives of performance pulse with urgency, resistance, and radical beauty. Their work is an embodied manifesto, reclaiming space, bending time, and amplifying the spectral echoes of Black life.

With a BFA in Dance Performance and a BA in African and African Diaspora Studies (with emphases in Black Performance Theory and Black Queer Studies) from The University of Texas at Austin, Uwazi’s scholarship is as rich and layered as their artistic practice. They hold an MFA in Dance from the late University of the Arts and are currently a doctoral candidate in Dance at Temple University, where they continue their deep investigations into movement, sound, and the political poetics of Black being.

Uwazi ’s performance career spans collaborations with some of the most compelling choreographers of our time, including Kevin Wynn, Steven Iannacone, Bill T. Jones, Dorrell Martin, Elijah Gibson, Stephanie Martinez, and Charles O. Anderson. Their journey began in 2011 as a member of Urban Souls Dance Company under the direction of Harrison Guy, grounding their artistic voice in a lineage of Black movement innovation. Beyond the stage, they have shaped dance’s intellectual and sonic landscapes, serving as a research consultant and dramaturg for Tommie-Waheed Evans and his company waheedworks and a sound designer for St. Louis Dance Theater, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company, PHILADANCO!, Drexel University, Ursinus College, and Swarthmore College.

Uwazi’s choreographic vision has been honored with the Houston Arts Alliance Support for Artists and Creative Individuals grant, the Let Creativity Happen! Grant, the 2023 University of the Arts Creative Research and Innovation Grant, and the prestigious 2024 Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship from Jacob’s Pillow. Uwazi was also 2025-2026 Dance Research Fellow at the Library for the Performing Arts, ther

With each creation, Uwazi stretches the limits of what performance can hold; melding body, sound, and spirit to evoke the ecstatic, the haunted, and the rebellious. Their work is an unapologetic act of world-building, an offering of Black queer futurity, and an insistence on transformation through the power of embodied storytelling. Uwazi does not simply make work—they conjure, disrupt, and reimagine, crafting a performance vocabulary that refuses erasure and demands to be seen, heard, and felt.