I work with and among bodies, searching for forms that long to be held, received, and connected.  I am a daughter and a mother searching for arrangements that hold, nurture and strengthen bonds of love.

My practice is an experiment in poetics as attention - to the spaces between self and collective, intention and practice, desire and choice. At its heart is a wound that is also an attunement: to what is disclosed, made vulnerable, or protected in relationships marked by power. I take this wound as a portal, connecting the personal with the collective, listening for what cannot be held between us might reveal about what we owe one another.

Through writing, rehearsal, and shared atmospheres, I reach toward tender concretisation: potential  infrastructures of care, presence, and reciprocity, even within the suspension of a present without guarantees.

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






















Jemma Desai is a writer, facilitator and artist committed to softness, searching for people and places where it is not necessary to be hard. 

Her practice, often  working through, or close to the body,  searches for forms that long to be held, received and connected with and draws from personal experience of atmospheres that enable or hinder reciprocity. 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 and narrates them through performance writing and collaborative research projects. She teaches in academic and non-academic contexts and 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. 

Jemma has worked with institutions including the BFI, British Council, LUX, and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and was Programmer in Residence at The Flaherty Seminar (2023–25). Current collaborations include Somerset House Studios (artist), BlackStar Film Festival (programmer), and BAM in Brooklyn (inaugural Experience Fellow), where she is working on a  performance research project supported in part by an RSC Interdisciplinary Fellowship. 

CV
London, UK
jemmadesai.com
jemmadesai at gmail dot com