Jennifer Harge

It begins with listening: 

how must I prepare myself for vesselship?

Jennifer Harge is a choreographer, performance artist, installationist, and educator. Her creative research conjures and theorizes Black worldmaking practices through intimate collaborations with her ancestral lineages and her immediate arts community. 

Harge honors a slow-paced practice to live inside of artistic questions across time, space, and varied contexts. Since 2014, she has developed her work almost exclusively in Detroit, creating performances, films, artist residencies, and community fellowship gatherings that critically engage Black being. Harge has cultivated her approach to creative research through long-standing relationships with independent artists in Detroit, as well as local venues and organizations that include Jam Handy, The Carr Center, Daring Dances, and Sidewalk Detroit.

Notable works, such as FLY | DROWN (2019-present) and mourn and never tire (2015-2018), were created in collaboration with the cultural, natural, and spiritual landscapes of Detroit, and articulate the interior worlds of Black life and living through meditations on embodied liberation, spiritual labor, and Black women's knowledge production. FLY | DROWN premiered as a performance installation at Detroit Artists Market, Detroit, MI (2019). Additional chapters of the work include a clearing, a film installation created with Devin Drake that was exhibited in Portal For(e) the Ephemeral Passage at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2022), and a single channel film exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI (2023). Harge’s work has also been presented at The Spring Church at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Washington National Cathedral, Washington, DC; and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Dayton, OH, among other organizations, universities, and venues.

She has been recognized with a Ruth Award from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts (2025), a Bogliasco Center Fellowship (2025), a Yaddo residency (2021), a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists (2019), Queer | Art’s Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists (2019), and a Kresge Artist Fellowship from Kresge Arts in Detroit (2017). 

Harge holds an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and a B.F.A. from the University of Michigan. She is the artistic director of her company Harge Dance Stories and an organizer with Get Dis War Dance, a national group of Black Movement Artists who recognize the role and power of dance in their work towards Black liberation.