
jumatatu m. poe
Philadelphia, PA
jumatatu poe is an artist based in Philadelphia, who grew up dancing in the living room and at parties with his siblings and cousins. His “formal” training includes international traditional and contemporary dance techniques, with a personal focus on joy, physical health, and Black aesthetics. poe uses performance, media, and environmental location to create performance work that destabilizes notions of identity, especially Black queer identity. He remains interested in examining the space—or creating the space—within Black art forms for queer Black futures. Through the fabulation of alternate, or unreal, narratives of history and imagined futures, poe creates nuance, subtlety, and happiness in relationship to Black narratives frequently rooted in realities of extreme loss, invisibility or hyper-visibility, and erasure. For nine years, he has practiced with the Black queer art form, J-Sette, which first publicly emerged from majorette lines at historically Black universities. He approached the form as a court tradition, containing within it ideas about societal formation, hierarchy, and situating of a society within relationship to larger environments. With terrestrial, his team will fabulate image-based renderings of future beings looking back to the general region of this present historical moment, performing court dances structured from reimagined historical narratives.
Photo: Tayarisha Poe

Jermone Donte Beacham, LaKendrick Davis, jumatatu m. poe, and Nikolai McKenzie perform Let ‘Im Move You – Intervention. Photo: Maria Baranova.
Performance still from Let ‘Im Move You – Intervention. Photo: Maria Baranova.
Nikolai McKenzie and Sanchel Brown perform Let ‘Im Move You – Formation. Photo: Maria Baranova.
jumatatu m. poe and Samantha Speis perform Terrestrial. Photo: Scott Shaw.
Samantha Speis performs Terrestrial. Photo: Scott Shaw.
jumatatu m. poe, Samantha Speis, and Rodrigo Jerônimo perform Terrestrial. Photo: Scott Shaw.
Video excerpts from Let 'im Move You: This Is a Formation
A medley of video clips from Let ‘im Move You: Intervention
terrestrial
jumatatu m. poe
jumatatu poe is an artist based in Philadelphia, who uses performance, media, and environmental location to create performance work that destabilizes notions of identity, especially Black queer identity.
Artist Bioterrestrial is a multimedia performance installation with choreography by jumatatu poe that stems from majorette lines that became popular at historically Black universities. Inspired by the hot brown granules in both desert dirt and beach sand, terrestrial is a rigorous imagination of Black humans as earth, epic, and finite.