Ogemdi Ude

Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance artist, educator, and full spectrum doula currently based in Harlem. She creates dance works that investigate how black folks’ cultural, familial, and personal histories are embedded in their bodies and influence their everyday and performative movement. She aims to offer tools for disrupting cycles of African Diasporic intergenerational trauma through intimate and collaborative performance making.

Her movement style emerges from the histories etched into her body: postmodern and contemporary training in college, Atlanta trap kickbacks in adolescence, and Afrobeat-filled Nigerian parties in childhood. She uses this physicality, as well as text, vocals, installation, and improvisation to foster environments for intrapersonal play and pleasure.

Black/POC femme and queer communities are prioritized in her practice. This extends to her work as a doula, where she offers critical intervention in the high death rates of black birthing people and babies by providing hands on support before, during, and after labor and delivery. Her performance practice focuses on ensuring the wellness of black bodies; becoming a doula gave her more tools to do so.

Her work has been presented at Danspace Project, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, Lewis Center for the Arts, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. She is a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow and 2019 BAX Space Grantee. She currently serves as Head of Movement for Drama at Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan. She served as Community Coordinator for the Public Works initiative at the Public Theater from 2018-2019. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University