dark matter series & residency Program

The 2024/25 Application Window has closed

Please follow @darkmatterresidency on Instagram for updates

Read the current Residency Guidelines below:

DMR 2024 Guidelines

The Dark Matter Residency supports Chicago-based, emerging artists of color whose work challenges the hegemonic hierarchies of race through performance and visual representation. The Residency provides artists with a flexible, functional space, a platform, and a network to help develop their work and careers.

A virtual information session was held on Friday, Feb. 16th at 2PM CST

Click on the video below to see the replay:

Click here to view presentation slides

2023/2024 Dark matter residency cohort

Pictured L to R: Carissa Lee, Muso, Sharon Udoh, PANTY, Jarius King

MEET THE ARTISTS

Carissa Lee is a performance and sound artist. She received her BFA in theater from NYU and her MFA from the School of the Art institute Chicago. Her work uses recordings, writing, Black southern culture and voice to materialize emotions ranging from grief to joy.
In addition to being an artist, she is a passionate teacher who has worked with theaters and non profits across Los Angeles - helping students of all ages use their lived experience to make performances. She has exhibited and performed in New York NY, Los Angeles CA, Chicago IL, and Quebec City Canada. She is extremely proud to be a member of Chicago based artist collective Suspended Culture.

Sharon Udoh (they/she) is a gay, first-generation Nigerian-American composer, pianist, arranger, and vocalist. Their work abandons genre for the expansive, to focus on human complexity, chaos, and connection. She sometimes takes the stage under the name Counterfeit Madison, whose performances have been described as a warm bowl of soup, a tornado, a jalapeño pepper, a Jackson Pollock painting, a bulldozer, dangerous yet kind, and magnetic. Her work, both original and arranged, has been commissioned by New York City Gay Men's Chorus, Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles, Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus, Atlanta Women's Chorus, and D-Composed Chicago. They are new to Chicago and have an absurd millennial addiction to sparkling water. Find out more at counterfeitmadison.com.

Muso is a storyteller whose goal is to create immersive worlds that center characters birthed from different aspects of her human experience. She focuses mainly on womanhood, sex, power and culture, ultimately as part of an identity which seeks to deconstruct and challenge hegemonic principles.

Brought up on the sonic transmissions of the Brooklyn underground, PANTY is an afro-caribbeing organizer and artist who is happy to report that hardcore will never die. Playfully peeling back the expansive layers of break- and bass-full selections across spacetime, they traverse realms so far, wide, and deep as skankhall, reggothton, doombow, trapper gabber, industrial club, dubwise glitch, hi nrg rave, euphoric jungle, and otherwise ambient chune dem for anti-capitalists.

Jarius “ManOfGod” King is a performing artist and Black Arts ("streetdance") instructor. A member of Rhythm Attack (Hong Kong) from 2006-2019, a current member of Motion Disorderz (U.S.A.), his beginnings as a serious dancer began in the year 2000 in the art of Breaking (commonly referred to as "Breakdance”). As part of Awesome Style Konnection, a dance group based out of his hometown, Chicago, he became versed in multiple styles of dance/movement. King's passion for dance to connect people from various backgrounds led to him co-founding and directing "Breakin' The Law: International Festival of Urban Movement." Started in 2004 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “BTL” ran for 11 consecutive years and grew to be one of the biggest annual urban dance festivals in the history of the Midwest. Including hosting qualifiers in Hong Kong, Capetown, Panama City, Manila, and various cities in the U.S.A., King is also a professional DJ and event MC known as King G.N.S. (pronounced "Genius"). Through his multiple talents and experiences, he expresses "I've learned to not be a great dancer or dance teacher. Instead I've learned to be great at self-expression and sharing my passion with the world.”