Performance Grant
2025 Winter Grantee
Ogemdi Ude
Ogemdi Ude - Interdisciplinary Artist
Photo by: Thomas Dunn
The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Winter Performance Grant to Ogemdi Ude for her Dance Theatre Project “Major“.
Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. As an educator, she has taught at The New School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and University of the Arts. She is a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient, a Live Feed Residency Artist at New York Live Arts, and a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence. She has been a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue.
“Major” is a dance theater project exploring the history and physicality of majorette dance, with a team of Black femmes embodying the movement of their girlhood to answer the questions of their present. Major preserves, transforms, and continues majorette legacy by integrating majorette movement, documentary theater, a live marching band, and an online interview-based archive. Through investigations of physical memory, sexuality, and sensuality, “Major” preserves and proliferates the creative practices and stories of the folks who taught the team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme.
Photo by: Myssi Robinson
Photo by: Myssi Robinson
“Major” will premiere in January 2026 at New York Live Arts followed by an international tour.
Please visit Ogemdi’s Instagram for more information.