Taja Will Artist

taja will

SOCIALLY ENGAGED ARTIST & HEALING PRACTITIONER

Quote of Impact

My work animates questions of belonging, kinship, queerness, solidarity and calls to stewardship. Developing a methodology of Diaspora Futurism is an invitation to the displaced to find renewed & remembered interdependence. This methodology poses Queer Ecology, Disabled Cosmology & BIPOC Kinship as pathways for healing past and future generations.

The aesthetics of my collaboratively created artistic works insist on attention to revolving state-based material for example a sense of loneliness, or control, or tenderness, or humor, or dissonance, or ritual, or a combination; resulting in multi-dimensional layering of physical and vocal expressivity. Themes in my work comprise of collective humanity; how we exist in our mundane and extraordinary socio-cultural environments.

Identity and lived experience is at the core of my values and how it unfolds defines my creative process. For Contact Quarterly, I wrote: “Folks with marginalized identities are somatically and psychically guarded, from generations past and a lifetime of systemic oppression; it is in the body and it will enter the dance.”

AWARDS + HONORS