Prize Winner 2023:
Harmony Holiday
Harmony is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker, and the author of five collections of poetry, including Hollywood Forever and Maafa ( 2022). She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music venue 2220arts and writes for the Los Angeles Times’ Image Magazine, 4Columnms, and The New Yorker among other publications. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley. She’s working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and a memoir, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects. Her first solo exhibition for The Kitchen follows her participation in LA’s Made in LA biennial in 2020/21, for which she wrote a play turned film titled God’s Suicide, which chronicled James Baldwin’s several suicide attempts throughout his life. Black Backstage will pick up on years of writing, research, and personal engagement around black performance culture and take some of her writing about the unseen aspects of this cultural inheritance off the page.