Sweat Variant – Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
Sweat Variant is the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. Since 1996, they have been working at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true center through the exploration of Black interiority. Okpokwasili and Born are interested in building a spectacle of radical intimacy, in which both performers and audience are acknowledged as being locked in a mutual gaze. They hope to activate a space that allows the audience to question who they are looking at, and how they are looking.
Okpokwasili and Born have created “Bessie” Award-winning pent up: a revenge dance and Bronx Gothic. The latter continues to tour internationally, most recently to the 2024 Milan Triennale. Other performances include let slip, hold sway, adaku, part 1: the road opens, Adaku’s revolt, swallow the moon, Sitting on a Man’s Head, and poor people’s TV room, which also toured the country. Their work has been featured internationally, including at the Berlin Biennale, the Young Vic, and the Tate. poor people’s TV room solo installation is in the Hammer and Whitney Museum collections.
Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, actor, choreographer, and writer. Okpokwasili has earned numerous accolades, including a 2025 Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. Okpokwasili was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist. She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022, and an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023. She continues to collaborate with Ralph Lemon, Kevin Beasley, Saidiya Hartman, and Kaneza Schaal, among others.
Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation, often in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili. He co-created The Venus Knot, he his own mythical beast, and VESSEL with David Thomson. His set design work with Nora Chipaumire includes rite/riot and El Capitan Kinglady.
