Naima Lowe

Email:

nalowe@ucsd.edu

Biography:

Naima Lowe is a writer, visual artist, performer, and PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, Criticism, and Practice at UC San Diego. Her entwined research and practice deal with Black Queer poetics and performance, speculative automythography, ensemble aesthetics, and the materiality of language. In 2024, Naima wrote, produced, and performed Late Bloomer, a Jazz-Punk-New Wave operetta about desire and ambition at the renowned Off-Off Broadway experimental theater, Mabou Mines. Her current book project, Rehearsals (forthcoming 2027, The 3rd Thing Press), combines drawings, poetry, and essays that are ekphrastic, conversational, inquisitive, and playful. Rehearsals takes Naima’s commitment to collaborative practice and deep belief in the importance of nurturing artists’ intuitive capacities as a springboard for wide-ranging explorations of the erotics of creative enterprise. This book will set the stage for Naima’s commitment to the boundary transgressions inherent to Black intellectual and creative traditions that raised her. She won the Franklin Furnace Xeno Prize for Performance Art in 2024 to support these two ongoing projects.

Naima has a BA in Africana Studies from Brown University and an MFA in Film/Video from Temple University. She’s held residency fellowships at The Bemis Center, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Mabou Mines, the Mid America Arts Alliance, and won an inaugural Jazz Road Creative Residency for her collaborations with her father. composer, trombonist, and tubaist Bill Lowe. Naima’s first film, Birthmarks, was a Student Academy Award Finalist, won Best Experimental Film at the Newark Black Film Festival, and in 2020 received the Duke University Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award.

Naima is also an experienced educator with a background in radical and liberatory pedagogy. She began her teaching career in adult literacy and art programs in Providence, Rhode Island, in the late 1990s. After graduate school, she taught experimental film and media studies at Temple University, University of the Arts, Goddard College, and was a tenured faculty member at the Evergreen State College until 2017. Since 2022, she’s been a central project coordinator for the liberatory writing community at Louis Place. Founded by Steffani Jemison and Quincy Flowers in 2020, at Louis Place is nurtured by and for artists and writers. This project is best described as “Black Feminist Popular Education for Artists and Writers in the Digital Age.” Other watchwords include mutual aid, cooperative leadership, physical and financial accessibility, and a deep belief that artists collectively possess vast knowledge regardless of their formal education or institutional affiliations.

Naima was born in 1979, and her mom and dad love her very much.