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\n \n \n \n The End(s) of Suffering: Timeless Embodied Methods of Presence and Belonging for Creative Survival
This workshop is intended to give students both practical tools and theoretical principles that center the idea of presence and liveness for making art in an increasingly overwhelming digital world. These tools come from both scholarly discourse and ancestral wisdom from the land and indigenous, pre-colonial traditions of various cultures. Students will co-create performance works inspired by presence and belonging in culture, psychotherapy, politics, and religion, with particular emphasis on the collective's survival of needless suffering.
Bio: Rashayla Marie Brown (aka Professor RMB) is an undisciplinary™ artist-scholar who bends time-based media to transform narratives of power, access, and mastery. Her works examine themes of ethics, visibility, vulnerability, and perception in performance, photography, and film, often deeply regarding the context and genre in which they unfold. Bold aesthetics and a wide emotional-spiritual range unite her approach to culture and knowledge. RMB has completed projects in venues on five continents, including Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva; Metrograph, NYC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Qalam wa Lawh, Rabat; Recess, Brooklyn; Rhodes College, Memphis; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Slamdance Film Festival, Park City; and Turbine Hall, Johannesburg.
Drawing from experiences as a PTSD Survivor and spiritualist, she is a PhD Candidate at Northwestern Performance Studies, with a project on slavery reparations, ancestral afterlife, and the ethics of Black femme artistic collaboration in Switzerland and the US. RMB's iconic essay \"Open Letter to My Fellow Young Artists and Scholars on the Margins\" went viral, leading Arc Magazine and Hyperallergic to republish it. Her work and words have been featured in Art Forum, Artsy, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Performa Magazine, Prospect New Orleans, and the covers of Chicago Reader and New City.
RMB began her practice as a poet and radio DJ. She founded the graphic design company Selah Vibe, Inc. in Atlanta, GA (2005-2011) and served as the inaugural Director of Diversity and Inclusion - a position she helped create - at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013-2017). From 2016-2023, she ran an artist housing initiative, RMB Properties, to provide affordable, short-term leases to traveling artists in transition. RMB studied Arabic and French through a US Dept. of Ed. fellowship in Morocco, served as Starr Fellow in the Royal Academy Schools in London, and holds degrees from Yale, SAIC, and Northwestern. Her advisors in these institutions include Iván Szelényi and Paul Gilroy (Sociology and African-American Studies), Barbara DeGenevieve (Photography), and Joshua Chambers-Letson (Performance) respectively.
An Ohio-born, US South- and Germany-raised descendant of enslaved Africans and Magyar immigrants, RMB is the firstborn child of a retired Master Army Sergeant and an SVP of Finance. She does not suffer fools. A compelling interviewer, she has publicly interviewed notable figures including Kimberly Drew, Juliana Huxtable, Ben Crump's client Tamara Lanier, and MacArthur Genius Amanda Williams. Not content to simply depict social problems, RMB overcomes suffering with innovative and inspiring means addressed to the collective/to you.