The Dark Girl Chronicles

The Dark Girl Chronicles is a ritual-play cycle designed to crystallize in collective memory the stories of three Black women warriors against state violence—Diamond Reynolds, Rachel Jeantel, and Islan Nettles. Part Yoruba or Bantu-Kongo sacred story, part communal ritual, and part documentary-manifesto, the three parts of the cycle—Chronicle X: Windows, Chronicle Y: Sugar, and Chronicle Z: Feathers—use court transcripts, police records, and media coverage to analyze the violent interpretive tactics of white supremacy and to restore these events to their own meanings. Deploying Black feminist technologies of ritual, magic, and spell, The Dark Girl Chronicles traverses deep ocean and deep space, finds difference in the darks of wombs, snail shells, and caves, and holds space for the interiority, vulnerability, and necessary dignity of dark girls.

Nia O. Witherspoon(Smith BA/Stanford PhD) is a Black queer multidisciplinary artist + healing justice practitioner investigating the metaphysics of Black liberation, desire, and diaspora, as they track across the quantum time-space continuum. A forever student and practitioner of African cosmologies, and combining Black feminism, eco-feminism, and auto-critogrophy with mediums in writing, theatre/performance, sound, and installation, Witherspoon creates portals for communion, witnessing, and healing into the ancient future. Current and recent works include: Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple to Pleasure + Wisdom School (HERE Art Center/Musical Theatre Factory, 2024), Chronicle X: The Dark Girl Chronicles (The Shed, 2021), and MESSIAH (La Mama, 2019). She is a recipient of the Tow Fellowship, NEFA/NTP, NPN Creation + Touring Fund, and NYSCA, as well as having been a Creative Capital Awardee, a Jerome New Artist Fellow, a current artist in residence at HERE Art Center and Musical Theatre Factory, and former resident at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange + New York Theatre Workshop. Her work has been or will be featured by Irondale, The Shed, BRIC, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Joe’s Pub, HERE, JACK, La Mama ETC, Playwright’s Realm, Links Hall, National Black Theatre, Brava Theatre, BAAD, Movement Research, BAX, Dixon Place, Painted Bride, 651 Arts, and elsewhere. Her writing is published in the Journal of Popular Culture; Imagined Theatres; Women and Collective Creation; and IMANIMAN: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands. She has held creative and academic appointments at BerkleeNYC, Williams College, Fordham University, University of Massachusetts, Florida State University, and Arizona State University.