Jade Solomon Curtis

Jade Solomon Curtis is a choreographer, interdisciplinary dance artist, and founder of Solo Magic, a non-profit arts initiative with the mission, “Activism is the Muse”.

Since beginning her solo career in 2015, Jade’s work has been presented by the Seattle Art Museum, Central District Forum for Art & Ideas, and Grammy Award-winning jazz composer John Clayton (NY) among others. In 2016, she choreographed and performed “Emancipation” as part of the landmark exhibition, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, and in Cuba as part of the Common Ground Music Project. A celebrated soloist of Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater, she is also the subject of an Emmy Award-winning short film directed by Ralph Bevins.

Her current works, Black Like Me: An Exploration of the Word Nigger and Keeper of Sadness, explore the body as an artifact of memory, space, and time by integrating new technologies to stimulate global conversations.

Jade received GAP 2016 funding for BLACK LIKE ME, a multidisciplinary project focused in dance that is intended to subvert and denounce mass depictions of black folks by addressing the use of the word nigger (and all its permutations) that perpetuate and impose negative thought processes on a people. It is her position that the word, “nigger” cannot be transformed as it is blood-soaked with castrations, lynchings, and rapes.