(she/her)
Omi Osun Joni L. Jones
is an artist/scholar/facilitator, and Professor Emerita of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Omi is dedicated to innovating new artistic and scholarly strategies for stimulating healthy communities toward Freedom and Joy.
Omi brought this focus to her work as Artist-in-Residence with
- Thousand Currents
- The NoVo Foundation
- The Federal University of Oye Ekiti (Nigeria) — Department of Drama
- And the founder of The Austin Project (2002-2011)—a collective of Global Majority artists, activists, scholars and allies who use art for re-imagining societies.
She has developed art as social change workshops for a range of organizations including:
- allgo—a Texas statewide queer people of color organization
- Educafro (Brazil)
- The Forum on Governance and Democracy (Nigeria)
- Engaged Donors for Social Equity (EDGE).
As a performing artist, her original works include:
- sista docta, a solo critique of academic life
- the ethnographic performance installation Searching for Ọ̀ṣun.
Omi has been a company facilitator with
- Ebony Noelle Golden’s In the Name of The Mother Tree
- Virginia Grise’s Cara Mia Theatre Residency
- Arielle Brown’s Black Spatial Relics 2021 Cohort
Omi’s scholarship focuses on performance ethnography, theatrical jazz, Yoruba-based aesthetics, Black Feminisms, and activist theatre. Her scholarship appears in several publications including The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Obsidian, solo/black/woman (eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón Rivera Servera), and Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theatre, Performance, and Collaboration (eds. Sharrell Luckett, David Roman, Isaiah Wooden).
I offer these strategies to others for individual expansion and community power.
Omi