Ayo Ohs

Ayo Ohs (A.O./they/she) is a socially engaged artist and director, working in performance, sound, movement, and healing arts. Ayo has presented choreography, original songwriting, and spatialized audio compositions in their NYC studio, and in NY and San Francisco, where their work was described as “feisty, clever and poignant” by the SF Bay Guardian.

Ayo was a close collaborator with Andrew Schneider in performance and direction with AFTER (The Public Theatre), NOWISWHENWEARE, and NERVOUS/SYSTEM (BAM Next Wave 2022, 2018). From 2013-2018, Ayo was a collaborative performer with Faye Driscoll, including performances at the Venice Biennale, the Walker Art Center, the Wexner, MCA Chicago, ICA Boston, PICA, Onassis Cultural Center Athens, and other international and national tours.

As an anti-racist organizer and somatic healer, Ayo was a co-facilitator of Radical Love and Equity with Milta Vega-Cardona, a founding member of Movement Research’s Artist of Color Council, and the founder of Anti-Oppression Yoga, a network of free online videos and classes. Ayo has worked in many community-based non-profits including the Audre Lorde Project under the direction of Healing Justice visionary, Cara Page. Ayo’s current project, The Silent Unseen, is a multi-year socially-engaged public art project addressing the history and silencing of Asian femmes, trans, and non-binary people. Including an audio tour tracing the history of Asian immigration, an oral history project mapping untold stories, somatic and vocal workshops, and a community-based performance, the work aims to celebrate difference, build solidarity between Asian communities, and examine the vastness of the term “Asian American.”

They are a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Experimental Theatre Wing, and continue to study Somatic Abolitionism with Resmaa Menakam and music production at Berklee College of Music Online. They live in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY. ayoohs.com