I am a body working close to other bodies in search of form that longs to be held, received and connected with. Through my work I attempt experiments in attention: to the spaces between me and us, and what we owe to each other. Sometimes I linger and expand in the absences and uncomfortable spaces that arise when confronting gaps between individual and structure, intention and practice, desire and choice. I yearn for shareable scenes and situations capable of deep listening, grounded presence and reciprocal integrity. In service of this yearning I search for the relational and spiritual infrastructure necessary to make these values into concrete promises (ordinary, practiced and embodied).  I am a daughter and a mother searching for arrangements that hold, nurture and strengthen bonds of love.

At the centre of my work is a wound, which is also an attunement: to the conditions which dictate what is disclosed, made vulnerable or protected, especially in relationships of asymmetric power. My practice is deeply felt, invested in, and sensitive to the turmoil that follows an offering that cannot be received. As a student of abolitionist, Black feminist and indigenous knowledge production, I take this wound seriously as a portal that connects individual experiences with collective possibilities. Through my commitments to being with feeling, I consider what pain generated between us might have to reveal about what we want from each other.

The writing, rehearsals, assemblages, energies and atmospheres I choose to share reach towards more hopeful formations. These offerings gesture to a belief I am building in fragments and glimmers: that in the fullness of presence with self and others there is transformative possibility.

I am a commitment to softness searching for people and places where it is not necessary to be hard.

































Jemma Desai is a commitment to softness searching for people and places where it is not necessary to be hard. As a writer and artist she seeks ways to hold the labour that strengthens bonds of love. 

She is a practice-based PhD candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama developing a project on abolitionist praxis as form and infrastructure in cultural production, working across writing and performance. Often working through, or close to the body, she searches for forms that long to be held, received and connected with. She often finds form through confronting personal experience of atmospheres and arrangements that hinder such reciprocity and narrates them through performance writing and collaborative research. In attending to and sharing experience of broken connection, she is interested in the different political horizons opened out by mutual witness and its absence.

She writes and teaches in a variety of academic and non academic contexts and has previously worked with the BFI, British Council, LUX and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. She was programmer in residence at The Flaherty Seminar between 2024-2025, where she attempted a research project on the role of group relations on the seminar in its past, present and future configurations.

Current collaborations include Somerset House Studios, where she is a resident artist, Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia where she is a Programmer and BAM in Brooklyn NY where she is the inaugural Experience Fellow. At BAM she is part of a multi-year performance research project enabled in part through an RSC Interdisciplinary Fellowship, considering how performance strategies and theory might shape the infrastructures of a performing arts organisation.

CV



London, UK
jemmadesai.com
jemmadesai at gmail dot com