Rashida Bumbray – Dance/USA Artist Fellow

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Image Description: A light-skinned black woman with wavy dark hair with brown highlights stands smiling on a Brooklyn stoop in a black lace dress under a black leather vest with a pair of black tap shoes hanging over her shoulder. Photo by Jamie Philbert.

Rashida Bumbray

she/her

Baltimore, MD | Piscataway and Susquehannock Nations

Rashida Bumbray is an award-winning choreographer, curator, and filmmaker deeply rooted in Black vernacular and folk traditions, including ring shouts, hoofing, and Blues improvisation. Like Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham, Bumbray merges curatorial and ethnographic methodologies with avant-garde practices, crafting intimate performances and films reimagining sacred and secular rituals. Her work explores the architectures of improvisation, surrender, and possession, offering poignant responses to contemporary experiences of displacement, erasure, and collective forgetting. 

Bumbray’s practice has earned numerous accolades, including the 2024 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, a 2024 Ruby’s Artist Award, a 2024 Tate Infinities R&D Award, and a 2019 United States Artist Fellowship. She was Civic Practice Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2017 to 2021. Her performances and films have been presented by institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Black Star Film Festival; Dia: Chelsea (with Leslie Hewitt); Harlem Stage; Dancing While Black; SummerStage; Tate Modern (with Simone Leigh); the New Museum (with Simone Leigh), and Project Row Houses. Her work, Run Mary Run, was named among The New York Times’ best performances of 2012 and is featured in Common’s short film, Black America Again (2016), directed by Bradford Young. She was nominated for a Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and continues to push the boundaries of dance, film, and ritual performance. A graduate of Oberlin College, Bumbray also has an MA in Africana Studies from New York University. Her writing on contemporary art, cultural studies, and comparative literature is published in journals and exhibition catalogs.

Learn more about Rashida Bumbray:

 

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Image Description: Two women in black dresses and black and white striped headwraps dance with arms stretched out in front of them. There is a small palm tree behind them and a projection of a video work entitled "Obelisks in Rome" by Terry Adkins. Photo from Flight into Egypt exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Image Description: A woman in a white dress and zulu ankle cuffs with can tops dances next to a large tree in an ecstatic position with arms outstretched. Film still from Braiding and Singing (a point) directed by Rashida Bumbray and filmed by Jamal Solomon.
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Image Description: A woman with short hair in a strapless red tartan dress and zulu ankle cuffs is standing on a staircase holding on to a bannister and pulling her body away from the bannister. Her right foot is resting on her left leg. Photo by Teddy Wolfe.

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