BA in Performance Studies, New York University
Rikki Amani is an essayist, family archivist, and a proponent of the Black Radical Tradition. Amani focuses on African American and diasporic aesthetic practitioners, particularly those whose lives converge at the intersection of both domestic and erotic performance.
Rikki’s work questions the materiality of staged performances as they slip into the performances of everyday life and everyday objects. She contemplates the creative and radical embodiments of Black mothers, sisters, and daughters through her research project; navigating the inherited archive of her grandmother, Dimples, a performer, blues and soul musician who passed away before she was born.
Meditating on intergenerational, spiritual and ancestral relationships forged through performance, Amani plays with the conjuring ability of oral history; offering the African American tradition of storytelling and preservation as a medium of inquiry into the afterlife of her grandmother's belongings and performances.