Black Diaspora Duet: Marýa Wethers & Jasmine Hearn

Black Diaspora events are open to a Black- or Afro-Latinx-identifying audience only.

Jasmine Hearn and Marýa Wethers will continue an ongoing non-linear conversation about their mercurial creative relationship, naming their various lineages and influences (both shared and otherwise) and reflecting on the intersections of their work.

About Marýa Wethers

Marýa Wethers (she/her) has lived and worked in Lenapehoking (NYC) since 1997 as a contemporary dance artist and independent creative producer & curator. As a dancer, Marýa received a 2017 NY Dance & Performance (“Bessie”) Award for Outstanding Performance with the Skeleton Architecture collective. As a curator, she conceived and created the three-week performance series Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing) at Gibney and curated for Mount Tremper Arts Watershed Lab Residency (2019 & 2018), Queer NY International Arts Festival (2016 & 2015), and Out of Space @ BRIC Studio series for Danspace Project (2003-2007). Her writings have been published in Configurations in Motion: Performance Curation and Communities of Color (2016 & 2015) organized by Thomas F. DeFrantz at Duke University and the Movement Research Performance Journal 25th Anniversary Issue #27/28 (Spring 2005). She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a BA in Dance, minor in African-American Studies, 1997.

About Jasmine Hearn

Jasmine Hearn was born and raised on occupied lands now known as Houston, TX.

They are an internationally touring interdisciplinary artist, director, choreographer, organizer, doula, performer and recipient of a 2022 Creative Capital grant, a 2022 Rome Prize in Design with Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency, and three Bessie Awards, Outstanding Performance (2017) with Skeleton Architecture, Outstanding Performance (2021), and Outstanding Production (2021) as part of the cast for The Motherboard Suite.

Jasmine has creatively collaborated with artists, Solange Knowles, Alisha B. Wormsley, Vanessa German, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Maria Bauman, Lovie Olivia, Ayanah Moor, Staycee Pearl, Holly Bass, Li Harris, and companies, Urban Bush Women, David Dorfman Dance, and Helen Simoneau Danse, which have produced solo and collective dance choreography for performances all over the world.

Their commitment to dance is an expansive practice, which is rooted in a layering of dance, somatic, and vocal traditions greatly influenced by teachers and mentors and includes performance, collaboration, and memory-keeping.

Jasmine gives gratitude to Spirit, their mothers, and all the mothering black people who have supported their dreaming dancing moving remembering body.

About Black Diaspora

Conceived by curator Eva Yaa Asantewaa during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprising, Black Diaspora launched its first activities in September 2020 as a Zoom-based peer support program serving up-and-coming, Black-identified dance and performance artists from various cultural backgrounds and aesthetic traditions.

With the support of Gibney, Black Diaspora has offered numerous peer group discussions, workshops led by notable guest artists, and conversations between artists. We celebrate the resourcefulness, accomplishments, and generous wisdom of Black creatives, educators, and activists.

Photo of Jasmine Hearn by Sonja Stavrova. Photo of Marýa Wethers by Erik Carter, courtesy of Skeleton Architecture.