Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a mother, choreographer, performer, a collaborative artist, community organizer and a three-time Bessie award winning choreographer and performer for her latest work, Memoirs of a... Unicorn. Marjani is an inaugural recipient of the UBW Choreographic Center Fellowship and a two-time Princess Grace Foundation awardee. Her work has been incubated in residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center (MANCC), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Extended Life Residency, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, CUNY Dance Initiative, 651 Arts and Movement Research. Marjani has produced seven award-winning works in steady collaboration with her partner and composer Everett Asis Saunders (New Music USA Awardee) over the last ten years. Humbly, she defines her work by its lineage stemming from culturally rich, vibrant, historic, loving and irreverent conjurers!

Fellowship Statement

My storytelling is intended to thicken the common narratives of people of the African Diaspora, and stir up visions for human liberation. What might freedom, a reality that elevates culture, look like? I commit to the work of shifting and visioning through art. I dance to tap my heart and my prolific imagination, to ignite vision or desire for ontological integrity and ascension in my audiences. In dance, I can imagine my own liberation and engage a fantasy of free-being as a plausible reality. With Memoirs of a.. Unicorn, developed in collaboration with composer Everett Saunders, I've centered on thoughtfully sharing the work such that it reflects our core values:

• To echo and affirm the work of local community organizers
• To be malleable in design for unconventional spaces and limited resources
• And to explore and affirm the complexity of blackness as a unifying, expansive, cross-cultural concept and network.

Photo by Ian Douglas.