Jemma Desai is a writer and artist. Through video, poetry, performance writing and collage, her practice explores forms of gathering, assemblage and circulation: of voices, bodies, images, ideas and ways of knowing across difference. Drawing on decolonial, black feminist and abolitionist thought, she is interested in artistic form as both an aesthetic and embodied social practice, and in the conditions through which culture is made, shared and received.
These questions underpin her practice-based doctoral research, which explores abolitionist praxis as form and infrastructure of feeling in cultural production.
Jemma has worked as film programmer, manager, board member, consultant, curator, convener and resident artist with institutions including the BFI, British Council, LUX, and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and BlackStar Film Festival. She has presented her work internationally at places such as IDA (Los Angeles), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), OCA Norway and Forum Lenteng (Jakarta). She was Programmer-in-Residence at The Flaherty Seminar (2023–25) where she developed an unrealisable seminar entitled Yearning. She was the inaugural Experience Fellow at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York where she worked on a performance research project supported in part by an RSC Interdisciplinary Fellowship.
Current collaborations include London Community Video Archive (Project Director) and Somerset House Studios (artist). With Gina Duncan, she is working on an multidisciplinary project funded by the Mellon Foundation engaging histories of Black feminist cultural production in the United States.
London, UK
jemmadesai.com
jemmadesai at gmail dot com