Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán
Photo courtesy of Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán
Bio
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is a multimedia artist, activist, critic, and educator, orchestrating visual, acoustic, performative, textual, and terrestrial techniques to produce work across 22 nations in the Americas, Africa, the Arab world, Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Pacific.
Bodhrán is the author of Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking and South Bronx Breathing Lessons, both forthcoming; editor of the international queer Indigenous issue of Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought; and co-editor of the Native dance, movement, and performance issue of Movement Research Performance Journal. His work appears in 190 publications.
A 2019 Tulsa Artist Fellow, Bodhrán has received scholarships/fellowships from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, CantoMundo, Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc., Macondo Foundation, and Lambda Literary Foundation.
Yerbabuena/Mala yerba, his current multimedia project, is a remapping of New York and California, the East and West Coasts, and Atlantic and Pacific worlds.
I am completing Yerbabuena/Mala yerba, an entwined poetry and prose multigenre book, one component of a larger interdisciplinary multimedia project comprised of visual, acoustic, olfactory, gustatory, performative, textual, and terrestrial elements. For Yerba, I am conducting experiential, archival, site-specific, and interpersonal research and collaborative travel throughout New York and California, along the East and West Coasts, and in and across the Americas and Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Employing transcompositional techniques to produce innovative, interwoven work, I am utilizing a range of tools and equipment to develop my pan-artistic, post-ekphrastic, investigatory approach.
Being awarded, within months of each other, both a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Tulsa Artist Fellowship means I can finally have a safe, secure base from which to work expansively, be free, create, build community, learn, grow, heal, and help others bring about their own healing and transformation in their own lives, our larger communities and movements, and this multi-species earth.
Experiencing the dynamism of receiving both awards at this pivotal stage of my career, as I increasingly embrace more collaborative and multimedia modes of inquiry, experimentation, creation, and engagement, means I will be able to more fully manifest, actualize, and materialize the complete range of my artistic vision, thereby having a deeper, more profound impact on, and relationship with, my communities.
I hope to learn, interpersonally, immersively, and intersectionally, about the histories, ongoing presence, and hoped-for futures of Indigenous, womanist, and queer/trans people of color artistic, activist, critical, and educational movements in Oklahoma, and my homes of New York and California, and the greater Americas, Atlantic, and Pacific—our concentric worlds—so I can reimagine these territories. Grounded and guided by this, I seek to collaborate and build in ways that center and support our communities, and the special gifts they bring this world.
