DIASPORADICA Workshop Series-Tuesday

An immersive, interdisciplinary workshop exploring the spectral residue of history, memory, and unrealized futures. This workshop draws from philosophy, Black studies, performance, film, and sound, students will examine how the past haunts the present through cultural repetition, loss, and glitch. Key texts include Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals. Through embodied research, creative response, and critical dialogue, participants will investigate how hauntology operates as both theory and praxis

About the artist: Maurya Kerris a bay area-based artist and the artistic director of tinypistol. Much of her work, across disciplines, is focused on black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. Maurya was a member of Alonzo King LINES Ballet for twelve years, an ODC artist-in-residence from 2015 to 2018, and holds an MFA in dance from Hollins University. After co-curating ODC Theater’s 2023/24 season, she was appointed as Resident Curator for their 2024/25 season. Maurya’s sophomore film, Saint Leroi, was described in the Village Voice as “a surreal meditation on Black history, violence, and American decay and a powerful indictment of racism.” Maurya is a 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellow; her poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart prizes and appears in multiple journals. Other recent honors include winning Rhino Poetry's 2024 Editor's Prize, second place in Palette Poetry's 2023 Resistance & Resilience Prize, and first place in the 2022 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. She is author of the chapbooks MUTTOLOGY and tommy noun (winner of the 2022 C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Award). www.tinypistol.com

For this three hour workshop, the five members of the RUPTURE collective will share movement elements of our DIASPORADICA performance score for group research including: two-stepping, black grammar, runwaying, hustling, siren body and more. Informed by Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, DeForrest Brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Tiffany Lethabo King’s works and thinking, we move into the depths, learning how to swim together.

Host or Publisher Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture