Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa ( 2022). She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music venue 2220arts as writes for LA Times’s Image Magazine, 4Columnms, and The New Yorker among other publications. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley. She’s currently working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and a memoir, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects. Her first solo exhibition for The Kitchen follows her participation in LA’s Made in LA biennial in 2020/21, for which she wrote a play turned film entitled God’s Suicide, that chronicled James Baldwin’s several suicide attempts throughout his life. Black Backstage will pick up on years of writing, research, and personal engagement around black performance culture and take some of her writing about the unseen aspects of this cultural inheritance off the page.