As part of her Queer South(s) residency, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and company, offer this special performance.
Sittin’ in a Saucer offers us the world of Mimi, a nine-year-old Black girl growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the late 1950s. She is the youngest of four daughters born to a mother from Louisiana and a father from Texas. Mimi is just starting to piece together the middle-class protocols of gender, race, sexuality, and class, as well as the worlds she comes from and the ones she wants to create. In this interactive performance, artist Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and an ensemble of creators build on Mimi’s experience to explore multiple stories of Black childhood, collective courage, and how we find home. *Note: this performance will begin in the lobby of the Drama Building. Audience members will be guided to the performance installation.
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Omi Osun Joni L. Jones’ work is grounded in Black Feminist principles and theatrical jazz aesthetics. Her original performances include sista docta—a critique of academic life; and Sittin’ in a Saucer—a series of readings with audience/witnesses using literature as prompts for engagement. Among her ethnographic works are Searching for Ọ̀ṣun—a performance installation around the Divinity of the River; and Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment—a collaborative ethnography of three theatrical jazz luminaries. Her forthcoming essay, “Queer Medicine,” can be found in Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy, 1924-2024 (Art Galleries at Black Studies, Austin, TX. Fall 2026). Omi has been shaped by Robbie McCauley’s activist art, Laurie Carlos’s insistence on being present, and Barbara Ann Teer’s overt union of Art and Spirit. She earned her Ph.D. from New York University, and her Embodied Social Justice Certificate from Transformative Change. She is Professor Emerita from and co-creator of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, the history of which is featured in the current issue of Callaloo, 43:4.