Selected Writing

A Letter, fragment, glimmer, traces in Radio Ballads, Songs for Change
Serpentine Read

Pray for a life without plot, a day without narrative:
Notes on Moving Bodies, Moving images
Whitechapel Read

ArtReview
Read

On Art and Friendship: Expanding What Relation Can Be Wasafari
This text builds on conversations in this podcast: Hear, Now. Episode 13: Artists' Film International 2021: Care Read / Listen

The questioned body; a body of questions LUXRead
A Letter to Leena about Care STUART
Read  

Mothering, family, abolition

M/othering for Liberation: A Declaration of Independence
SEEN Issue 002, Spring 2021
Read
I do not want what I haven’t got: For Sinead O Connor and anyone who has wanted to die SubstackRead

What do we want from each other after we have told our stories? ARTPAPERS

Film
The Desire to write about George Green
A Letter to Onyeka Igwe responding to The Miracle on George Green
Open City Documentary Festival Read
Here to stay Here to fight
an essay on Adam Lewis Jacob’s exhibition Idrish (ইদ্রিস) 
LUX
Read
Programme Notes on Ashim Ahluwalia’s John & JaneBatalha Centro de Cinema
Read
Programme Notes on the films of Paula Tomás Marques
Batalha Centro de Cinema Read
Programme Notes on Silverlake Life: The View from Here
Batalha Centro de Cinema
Read
Programme Notes  on Luísa Homem and Pedro Pinho’s Trading Cities
Batalha Centro de Cinema
Read
DVD liner notes On Josephine Decker’s first two features Butter on the Latch & Thou Wast Mild and Lovely Oscilloscope
Read

presencing

 
Abolition, to me, is an attitude ... a theory of change, and an absolutely practical politics. It's an attitude about how you think about the world you're in ... It's not just an absence, it's a presence.

— Ruth Wilson Gilmore




I Am Not a Performance Artist I have a problem with the name "performance." …If pressed to describe what I do, I'd say that I am writing in space. I guess that comes from being trained as a writer … But I was never able to accommodate to the linearity of writing. Perhaps I'm too conscious of the stages I've lived through and the multiple personalities I contain. I think I'm also too aware of the interstices between consciousness and the unconscious …The fact is, except for the lyric poem, writing is the art form most closely bound to time; but to layer information the way I perceived it, I needed the simultaneity I could only obtain in space.

— Lorraine O’Grady¹

Current I am a practice-based PhD candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama exploring abolitionist praxis as form and  infrastructure in cultural production.


Ongoing Tremblement/Intifada A work-in-progress that departs from practice research into therapeutic tremoring techniques which unwind tension and trauma long held in the body to open out possibilities of new ways to live never before imagined.  By thinking through different forms of embodied knowledge and their social construction, the workshop invites us to consider the materiality of abolitionist relation. What does the interdependence of our somas in creating such a movement (the tremor will not activate unless the body intuits the conditions of safety) have to teach us about the conditions necessary for the transformation of interpersonal and collective relations?

A Work in Progress was presented at Hospitalfield in October 2024 as part of
Study Day on The Voice
organised with Adam Benmakhlouf


PastWhat do we want from each other after we have told our stories What do we want from each other after we have told our stories is an iterative performance that explores liveness, desire, and the possibilities of social relation through the infrastructures of cultural production. The project began from two strands of  research - one into mothering across racial and cultural differences and another into racism and institutionalised work practices. Each iteration takes Audre Lorde's poem They are no honest poems about dead women as an anchor to situate the curatorial as sitting in a set of lineages that reify and institutionalise care into patriarchal production but fail to actualise its feminist praxis.








Public Intimacies: Autoethnography As Refusal, ICAAn earlier iteration of What do we want from each other after we have told our stories  from January 2020 where I explored the idea of public intimacy by thinking about the conditions in which I wanted to read texts I had written which would end up forming the most intimate parts of This Work isn’t For Us. Using my fee to buy all of the seats in the cinema, I invited trusted friends to witness the work. It continued in August 2020 as a video work reflecting on the circulation and receipt of This Work isn’t For Us.
Link

Yearning as Method: Notes on programming
Latifah and Himli's Nomadic Uncle A performance and letter writing workshop for cultural workers at The Office of Contemporary Arts Oslo (OCA) ReadListen

Notes on insufficiency
(ON FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING  OF THE PEARL)
Read
Ground Provisions
A reading for the closing weekend of LABO*R, inspired by Stefano Harney and Tonika Sealy Thompson’s text of the same name which instigates an integrative space to undertake the necessary root-working to grow ground provisions. Ground provisions as in relational resources, infrastructure, tools, and value systems needed for cultural work claim its autonomy and locality. Details
Public Intimacies: CorrespondencesA Programme of Films by filmmaker Alia Syed along with readings with artist Jasleen Kaur.
Link
Jemma Desai on I am DoraInstitute of Contemporary Arts
Read
As We Are Giving We Are Receiving Jemma Desai & Barby Asante
12 Hour Sit-in Revel
Watch
Conversation with Zarina Muhammad This Work Isn't For Us
Part 1, Online Event at LUXWatch
Conversation with Aditi Jaganathan This Work Isn't For Us
Part 2, Online Event at LUXWatch
Conversation with Rabz LansiquotThis Work Isn't For Us
Part 3, Online Event at LUX
Watch
Conversation with Jamila ProwseLight+ Collective Imaginings, Episode 2
Listen
Hear, Now. Episode 13: Artists' Film International 2021: Care
Listen
Conversation with Imran PerrettaChisenhale Gallery
Read

1. Performance Statement no. 3  Thinking out loud about Performance Art and my Place in it (1983).

offering

On another day, I might ask students to ponder what we want to make happen in the class, to name what we hope to know, what might be most useful. I ask them what standpoint is a personal experience. Then there are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountaintop and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountaintop is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.

— Bell Hooks

Taped inside the top drawer of my desk is a small scrap of paper with three words scrawled across it: “Love, Study, Struggle.” It serves as a daily reminder of what I am supposed to be doing.

— Robin D. G. Kelley 





Teaching
I work as a lecturer and also a facilitator of creative workshops and spaces of independent study. 

I have worked as an Associate lecturer at London School of Communications on their Film and Screen Studies course,  and I have planned and led sessions on film programming, developing screen programmes and festivals at Westminster, University of the Arts, Kingston School of Art and TURF projects amongst others. I have also worked with BA filmmaking students at Kingston School of Art helping to develop their projects through group and one to one tutorials to consider their practices through the lens of documentary ethics , marking and assessing work and providing pastoral support.   

At Central School of Speech and Drama I led  MA Creative Producing students through their independent research projects, designing and teaching a course on methods and methodology and taught on the BA  Experimental Performance course, supporting students towards their final projects. At Chelsea School of Art for the MA Curating students.  I developed a 6 week course on ambivalence, embodiment and desire in curatorial practice called ‘I want everything for everyone and I want to be wanted’.

I have guest lectured on my practice at many institutions including University of Sheffield, University of Leeds, St Andrews,  SOAS and Royal College of Art, Dartmouth College and Williams College.

Beyond formal spaces of learning, I seek spaces of study, practice and learning where the relational, spiritual and sensorial are valued. During the nationwide lockdown in 2020, I held a 9 month long weekly Teach-In drawing on themes and texts from my work and to share the experience of these life altering months.  



Re_ Searching + Researching Dreaming New Ways Through Sharing Learningwith Jemma Desai & Zain Dada
CIVIC SQUARE
Watch 
(Un)learning for Liberationwith Joshua Virasami; Dylan Rodríguez; Sonya Childress; Asher Gamedze;
Thenmozhi Soundararajan; Kelsey Mohamed; Camille Barton;
Aditi Jaganathan
Stance Podcast
Listen






Resources 
The Undercommons:
Fugitive Planning & Black Study  Read
Ungrading: An FAQRead
Ground provisions Read
Dear Science and Other StoriesRead 
Teaching to TransgressRead
 Black Study, Black Struggle Read
Research Is CeremonyRead
Decolonizing Non-Violent CommunicationRead

watching 

I watch films and attend to the conditions that allow them to appear and circulate, how, where, and to whom.

In recent years, attending to the how of showing films — as Ruth Wilson Gilmore would have it “Why this? Why this, here? Why this, here, now?” — has preoccupied me more than researching what films should or could be shown. This has meant films and programmes have rarely been assembled at all.

I want this space of absence to be known as a space of desire.  

You can read and watch more about my thoughts on this here and here. 



Previously I was a film programmer for 10 years in festivals and cinema exhibition and programmed independent film events through a screening series before that. 

In 2021 I was Head of Programming at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) and was the Co-Chair of LUX between 2017-2022 between 2021-2025. I was the Chair of the Feature Film Programming Committee at Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia, and between 2023-2025 I was Programmer in Residence at the Flaherty Seminar where I developed an unrealisable seminar entitled Yearning which has been erased from view. 

Other collaborations are United Screens and A Circle Of Protection, a film collective with Samia Labidi, Abhishek Nilamber and Viknesh Kobinathan committed to responsive spaces of gathering and offering rooted in south to south connections and solidarities.

Selected Related Works
The Limits of SharingBy Simran Hans
Read
Best Girl Grip PodcastInterview with Nicole Taylor
Listen
Reflections 5Tara Judah
Read
Reflections 6:
Tara Judah
Read
Notes from the FieldConversation with Matt Turner on Sentient. Art. Film
Read
When Hope Is Weary:Jemma Desai Questions What We Choose to Ignore
International Documentary Association
Read / PDF

Conversations
How we Gather with United Screens
IDA Watch
Cinematic Interventions to Freeing Palestine & The Global South Symposium

No Evil Eye Cinema Watch
The Truth about Film Festival
Distribution Advocates Listen
Creating spaces, sharing spaces
Berlinale Forum Expanded
Watch
Deconstructing Festivals: How much do we want what we say that we want?
Open City Documentary Film Festival
Read
In conversation with Rehana Zaman
BFMAF
Listen
In conversation with Jordan Lord
BFMAF
Listen
In conversation with Suneil Sanzgiri
BFMAF Listen
About Girlfriends: in conversation with Claudia Weill
Institute of Contemporary Arts
Read


Keynotes & Lectures
IDA KeynoteA film worker’s search for integrity Watch / Read
Yearning for new ways to make and circulate:
towards an infrastructure of being longing
Abandon Normal Devices Keynote Listen
Yearning as Method:
Notes on Programming Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle
Independent Cinema Office
Watch / Read







Selected Programmes

What is to be UndoneA symposium co-programmed with Ethan Philbrick
Brooklyn Academy of Music June 2025
Programme
Yearning
Flaherty Programmer-in-Residence & Seminar Programmer
The Flaherty 2023-25  (Unrealised, Uncredited)
Announcement
Announcement
BFMAF 2021 Notes (on programming)
Guiding Thoughts
Online Exhibition
Public Intimacies: CorrespondencesA Programme of Films by Alia Syed
London Short Film Festival 2020
PDF
Domestic Estrangement
Raven Row
Listen
The seven provocations Little White Lies
A London panel event looked to ask questions about how best to achieve gender equality in the film industry.
Read
Two films by Josephine Decker
UK Tour website
Read
Adventures with UK audiences: taking two films by Josephine Decker on tour
by Simran Hans
Read
I am Dora Between 2012-2015 I curated a screening series and publication that explored identification with female characters through the frame of psychoanalysis. Each screening began with a performance introduction and was accompanied with a printed publication which explored my identification with characters in the films which was designed with Claire Huss.

Rarely has promotional publication been so meticulously thought out
Its Nice That Read
On beginning I am Dora
Institute of Contemporary Arts Read
Who, What Why Jemma Desai on I Am Dora AnOther Magazine
Read
On-Screen Activism at the London Short Film Festival
AnOther Magazine Read

7 female friendships on film British Film Institute BFI
Read

feeling

We understand a doula to be someone who holds space for others during times of transition. In our rage and resourcefulness, our hope and our hurting, our conviction and our care, we hold space for the transition that an uprising might be. We can also safeguard and shepherd seeds, helping to cultivate conditions for change. A doula minds demands and dangers, needs and the nascent. A doula asks. A doula listens. A doula can be quiet. A doula can scream…..A doula dances with uncertainty, admits to not knowing. A doula is a formulation, a formation, a praxis, an action, an opportunity to give and to grow. Solidarity and love are doulas.

What does an uprising doula do? One Institute






I am a commitment to sensation (even where there is numbness) and to softness (where it is not necessary to be hard).
I search for practices which might hold us through change, transition, difficulty and doubt.  I learn and practice with others who want to find new shapes and ways together.

In service of these commitments I find practices and communities who offer tools, solidarity and acknowledgement to support the physical, emotional and spiritual dimension of personal and social change.  

In the last years my work has been to process my experiences of indifferent systems, and the knowledge generated from them. At the core of this reflection, has been an attempt to deeply interrogate the social, psychological and physical effects of relational defeat, and connect them to their political significance.  IIn this inquiry I have more questions than answers.

I am a Level I certified facilitator of The Resilience Toolkit and I have achieved Level II Politics of Trauma course with Staci K Haines 

I am a level one practitioner in Narrative Therapy and have completed an advanced training in the Tree of Life with PHOLA.  I am currently completing an immersion with the Center for Collective Wisdom. 

I am on my journey to becoming a birth worker with Abuela Doulas.







Further Reading
The Politics of Trauma Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice Read
Embodied Social Justice Rae Johnson
Routledge Book, 2nd Edition
Read
Building Resilient OrganizationsThe Forge
Read
Our bodies are incredible sources of informationNkem Ndefo on stress and The Resilience Toolkit
Read

archiving

Some past
selves, 
work, 
attempts 
 failures.