Sweat Variant describes the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. We are partners in our work and our lives. Since 1996, we have been working at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true center through the exploration of Black interiority.

We are interested in building a spectacle of radical intimacy, where both performers and audience are acknowledged as being locked in a mutual gaze. We build gestural vocabularies and narrative frameworks that are concerned with the problem of memory in the inherent instability of the construction of a persona.

We hope to activate a space that allows the audience to question who they are looking at and how they are looking. We hope this creates a critical space of wonderment, of uncertainty, and of mystery. It is in this space that we believe we can see each other anew. 

Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a performing artist, choreographer, and writer. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in her work. After graduating from Yale College of Arts and Sciences in 1996, Okpokwasili moved to New York City to continue performing. In 1998, she trained in Butoh dance with Min Tanaka at the Body Weather Farm in Hakushu, Japan. Soon afterwards, she began a series of collaborations with choreographer and director Ralph Lemon. Their work together includes How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?; Come Home, Charley Patton; a duet performed at The Museum of Modern Art as part of On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century; and Scaffold Room. During this period, she also performed in many downtown New York theater works, including Nora Chipaumire’s Miriam; Kristin Marting’s SOUNDING; Young Jean Lee’s LEAR; Richard Foreman’s Maria Del Bosco; Richard Maxwell’s Cowboys and Indians, and Joan Dark.  

In 2008, she and her longtime collaborator and husband, Peter Born, began presenting their own work in New York City. It has since been staged throughout the United States and internationally. Their work blends dance, visual arts, and text to create productions and participatory practices that have been shown in theaters, galleries, museums, and public spaces. Their productions include, among others, pent-up: a revenge dance; Bronx Gothic; poor people’s tv room; poor people’s tv room solo; when I return who will receive me; Adaku’s revolt; adaku, part 1: the road opens; let slip, hold sway; and my tongue is a blade. Participatory practices include sitting on a man’s head and procession. Their album day pulls down the sky was released in 2020.

Okpokwasili and Born’s work has been exhibited in museum and gallery installations internationally, including at the New Museum in New York; The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the Kunsthall Trondheim in Trondheim, Norway; Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, UK; Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles; and at the Venice Biennale. Their work poor people’s tv room (solo) installation (2021) is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum. In 2020, Okpokwasili co-curated the Danspace Project Platform Utterances from the Chorus, which brought together performing artists around a central question, “How do we weave a collective song?”

Okpokwasili’s work extends into film and music videos, including Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Stephan Littger’s Malorie’s Final Score, Knut Åsdam’s ABYSS, Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter, Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax, Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend; and the video for Jay-Z’s song 4:44, directed by Arthur Jafa. She has also worked with many renowned film and theater directors, including Carrie Mae Weems, Terence Nance, Camille A. Brown, Josephine Decker, Charlotte Brathwaite, Jim Findlay, and Annie Dorsen. She played a principal role in Mika Rottenberg and Mahyad Tousi’s 2021 feature film Remote, as well as the titular character in Jaume Collet-Sera’s 2025 film The Woman in the Yard.

Okpokwasili has received commissions from the Institute for Contemporary Arts/Boston; The High Line; the French Institute Alliance Française; Danspace Project; Jacob’s Pillow; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the American Dance Institute; Walker Art Center; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Performance Space 122; Le Mallion in Strasbourg; Théâtre de Gennevilliers in Paris; Theatre Garonne in Toulouse; Zagrebačko Kazalište Mladih (ZKM), and the Zagreb Youth Theatre.

Okpokwasili’s awards include New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for pent-up: a revenge dance (2009) and Bronx Gothic (2014) as well as for her performance in Ralph Lemon’s Come Home, Charley Patton (2005). In 2018, she received the Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a Doris Duke Award, a Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She received an inaugural Antonyo Award in 2020 for Best Featured Actor in the Public Theater’s production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. In 2025, she received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has received numerous fellowships and residencies from institutions including The French American Cultural Exchange (2006-2007); Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (2012); Baryshnikov Arts Center (2013); New York Live Arts Studio Series (2013); Under Construction at the Park Avenue Armory (2013); New York Foundation for the Arts (2013); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Program (2014-17, 2019-20); ICPP at Wesleyan University (2015), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts’s Artist Grant in Dance (2014); BRIClab (2015); Columbia University (2015); the Rauschenberg Foundation (2015); and Carolina Performing Arts, UNC-Chapel Hill (2019-2022). Okpokwasili was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist. In 2019, she was a Movement Research Resident Artist supported by the Rosin Fund. In 2022, she was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at the Museum of Modern Art. She was an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023. Okpokwasili currently lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Peter Born, and their daughter Umechi.

Peter Born is a director, composer and visual designer who works at the intersection of dance, performance and installation.  He has created work at MoMA, the Young Vic, the Berlin Biennial, the Doris Duke Foundation, the High Line, the New Museum, the Wiener Festwochen, the Tate Modern and the Loophole of Retreat at the Venice Biennial.  In collaboration with the artist Okwui Okpokwasili, he founded the company Sweat Variant which has created multiple performance works, including most recently “my tongue is a blade” (2025) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art), “let slip, hold sway” (2025) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and “adaku, part 1: the road opens” (2023) at  Brooklyn Academy of Music, ICA Boston and REDCAT. Previous work includes “Sitting on a Man’s Head” (2019), “Adaku’s Revolt” (2019), “at the anterior edge” (2018), “when I return, who will receive me” (2016), “Bronx Gothic (The Oval)” (2014).

Four of Peter’s collaborations have garnered New York Dance Performance “Bessie” Awards, “pent up, a revenge dance” (2009), “Bronx Gothic” (2013),“Poor People’s TV Room” (2017) and “he his own mythical beast” (2018) with David Thomson.  Additional work as a set and lighting designer includes “The Venus Knot” (2017), “Chimera” (2017), and “Vessel” (2023) with David Thomson, and “rite/riot” (2014) and “El Capitan Kinglady” (2016) with Nora Chipaumire.  

Peter’s work as a commercial art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estee Lauder, Barney’s Co-op, Bloomingdales, Old Navy, “25” magazine, The Wall Street Journal and No Strings Puppet Productions. He is a former New York public high school teacher, itinerant floral designer, corporate actor-facilitator, video maker and furniture designer.  He’s a proud dad. 

Collaborative visual artworks by Born and Okpokwasili have been featured in exhibitions around the world and are in private and institutional collections, including the Whitney Museum and the Hammer Museum.  In 2019, they released an album featuring songs from their performance work entitled “day pulls down the sky”, executive produced by Danspace Project. Through their company Sweat Variant, Born and Okpokwasili are creating a network of mutual support among artists, through programs such as their Threading Residency and their ASAP funding program.  This work has been recognized with institutional support from the Mellon Foundation.