JENNIFER HARGE

Jennifer Harge is an artist and educator rooted in the legacies and futures of Black experimental performance and Black spiritual traditions. Using movement as an organizing principle, she spills across choreography, installation, film, and language—collapsing form and gifting herself the freedom to play, wander, and be with multiplicity.  

A dedicated member of Detroit’s dance community since 2014, Harge has developed a number of creative containers for Detroit artists and audiences to engage one another across fields and experiences. Her creative practice has been nationally recognized as a critical model for community-focused artistic processes, including an artist case study conducted in 2020 by the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and an inaugural 2019 Dance/USA Fellowship awarded to artists engaging in art for social change. 

Black Detroit has been a partner and teacher in Harge’s work. Through her movement collective, Harge Dance Stories, she created a choreographic platform to articulate the interior worlds of Black life and living through meditations on mourning, protest, femme and queer pleasure practices, and embodied liberation.

Harge’s creative work is a rememory practice: she listens into the spiritual knowing Black people have long engaged in sustaining themselves, families, and communities across generations. Anchored by a series of movement strategies she encounters, creates, and prays for, her rememory practice is a spiritual invocation ushering in the wisdom she has been separated from due to colonialist capture. 

In 2023 she was the Alma Hawkins Visiting Memorial Chair in Dance at UCLA and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also served on the faculty at the University of Michigan, Oakland University, Illinois State University, and Movement Research.

She has been commissioned to present work at The Saint Louis Black Repertory Company, Wexner Center for Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Cranbrook Museum of Art, and several other organizations and universities across the country. Her work has also been supported in the form of arts fellowships and grants including a 2023 Dance/USA Archiving and Preservation Fellow; 2022 Flourish Fund awardee by Culture Source; 2021 Wexner Artist in Residence; 2018 Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women+ Dance Artists by Queer| Art; and a 2017 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. 

Harge holds an MFA in Dance from University of Iowa and a BFA in Dance from University of Michigan. 


BACKGROUND PHOTO CREDIT: JEREMY BROCKMAN