About this Artist

d. Sabela grimes is a trans-media storyteller, sonic ARKivist, movement composer. Improvisational systems and collaboration are at the heart of his creative practice, inhaling through socio-historical observation, self-examination and speculative meanderings, exhaling through layers of interconnected sonic, visual and kinesthetic arrangements. Sabela’s creative practice invests in the poetics of assemblage, the magic of mutability, and mastering misuse. Sabela works closely with experimental video and movement artist, Meena Murugesan, to invent graphic symbolic systems to inspire sound design, video content and generate movement scores. Past projects include Philly XP, World War WhatEver, 40 Acres & A Microchip and ELECTROGYNOUS, which declares that Black gender qualities are infinite, multidimensional and distinct manifestations of wombniversal consciousness. Sabela’s current collaborative endeavor with Murugesan, Parable of Portals, dreams Octavia E. Butler’s body of work, including Butler’s personal writing and unfinished manuscripts, into modular multi-disciplinary performance/installation experiences. Each experience realizes quantum Blackness as a means to play within the nowness of recurring futures. On faculty at USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, he continues to cultivate, Funkamental MediKinetics, a movement system that draws on the layered dance training, community building, and spiritual practices evident in Black vernacular and Hip Hop/Street dance forms. He is a 2023 USC Associates Award for Artistic Expression recipient, 2021 Bessie Award recipient for Outstanding Performer, 2017 County of Los Angeles Performing Arts Fellow and 2014 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow. Sabela loves pancakes, speculative fiction, and his kinfolk.