Early Phase Residency: Sage Ni’Ja Whitson
Sage Ni'Ja Whitson will be working on their new project, Trans Trappist the Extraterrestrial: Flight of Seven Planets. Trans Trappist the Extraterrestrial is an experimental trap opera, live performance art, and VR sculpture project made for and in microgravity.
Whitson embodies the work as, Trans Trappist, the conductor and librettist, a Transgender Extraterrestrial who speaks the galactic wisdom of the TRAPPIST planets. In a terrestrial juxtapostion Whitson collides TRAPPIST with a theoretical intervention of Transness and Trap Music - a Black cultural, technological, and musical phenomenon - signaling possibilities of flight and Black imagination, in the creation of a new critical and creative endeavor.
The CRCI Early Phase Residency with Sage Ni'ja Whitson is supported by the Brown Arts Institute and The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) at Brown University.
March 2025
Photo by Ryan Landell.
Sage Ni’Ja Whitson (they/them) is an international award-winning multihyphenate noted by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer and the Park Avenue Amory as a “trailblazing XR artist to know”. They are a 2025 DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Visual Arts Fellow, MacDowell Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, Creative Capital and two-time "Bessie" Awardee who engages anti-disciplinarity through a critical intersection of the sacred and conceptual in science, technology, and art. Their multi-form works on dark matter and dark energy, via The Unarrival Experiments, have been commissioned across the world and media, including recently at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Black Speculative Arts Movement – Denver, a forthcoming solo exhibition at the California African American Museum, and a manuscript to be published by Wesleyan University Press, Transtraterrestrial: Dark Matter and Black Divinities.