Photo by: Cyrah L. Ward
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Cyrah L. Ward
(She, They) ... Cyrah L. Ward (pronounced seer-ah) is an interdisciplinary performance-maker, Black dance scholar, and educator whose work sits at the intersection of memory, ritual, and Black interior life. Working across dance, performance, text, sound, digital media, and fiber material assemblage, Ward creates embodied environments where the body becomes a site for remembering, repair, and refusal.
Rooted in Black storytelling traditions, Ward’s practice privileges the Black gaze through an autoethnographic approach to staging the mundane. Her work draws from lived experience, domestic ritual, and everyday gesture to explore how and where Black bodies store knowledge, carry rupture, and generate their own systems of care. Her installation practice emerges in direct conversation with her performance work and a desire to make that work accessible. In doing so, Ward has created immersive, altar-derived installations in unconventional spaces such as performance venue lobbies, extending the life of the work beyond the stage. Her current visual practice expands this lineage through fiber material assemblage, using found objects and fiber-based materials to ritualize objects from the everyday. Ward’s current performance research, Kitchen Talks, is an ongoing series that uses the domestic kitchen as both method and metaphor, examining inherited labor, intimacy, and real talk as tools for social critique and personal and collective testimony. Ward’s work moves fluidly between memory-responsive world building, live performance-making, and academic environments, reflecting her knack for creative multiplicity and intellectual range. She approaches making as a form of listening to history, sensation, and lived experience, and understands art-making as a communal act rooted in care. |