PRACTICE
Trae is interested in the many ways we become ourselves. How memory, mythology, migration, and the stories we inherit shape our understanding of who we are. How the people we love, the communities we belong to and the audiences we perform for influence the selves we construct.
Drawing from personal experience, history and imagination, Trae creates worlds where the self is both invented and undone. Their work considers the relationship between private experience and public perception, particularly how visibility and the desire to be seen can alter our understanding of ourselves.
“performance is the way I write most effectively”
-Lorraine O’Grady
“Performance Statement #3: Thinking Out Loud: About performance art and my place in it.”
Their relationship to performance began at Baltimore's Arena Players — the oldest continuously operating African American youth theater in the US, where they studied acting, dance, and vocals under the guidance of Robert F. Chew. As a teenager, they made their television debut on HBO's The Wire, sparking a passion for embodying characters beyond the stage, for film and TV.
That early education continues to shape their work across poetry, film and image-making. The body remains central to their practice, both as an instrument of performance and a means of examining Blackness, womanhood, queerness and the shifting ways we construct ourselves.
And I And Silence
Signature Theater, New York
Signature Theater, New York
Livingroom
Mid-City, Los Angeles
Mid-City, Los Angeles
WORK
PERFORMANCE
2012
2013
2016
2018