Gabrielle Civil

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist and poet, originally from Detroit MI. She has premiered over forty original solo and collaborative performance art works around the world, including a year-long investigation of practice as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico and a trilogy of diaspora grief works after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Her memoir in performance art, “Swallow the Fish,” was named as one of “34 Books by Women of Color to Read This Year” (electricliterature.com) and one of “20 Must-Read Books for Spring 2017” (Redbook). “Tourist Art,” her fine art / poetry collaboration with Haitian artist Vladimir Cybil Charlier, was a “Spotlight Zine” in the POC Zine Project.

Her next performance memoirs include "Experiments in Joy," "( ghost gestures )," "the déjà vu" and "In & Out of Place." (Although the author has the same name, this Gabrielle Civil is *not* the author of "Gabrielle's Naive Art" )

Her writing and translations can be found in the anthologies "New Daughters of Africa," "Black in the Middle," “Kitchen Table Translation,” “Walk Towards It,” “Writing through the Visual and the Virtual: Inscribing Languages, Literature and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean,” “Amour, sexe, genre et trauma dans la Caraïbe francophone”and “Blues Vision: African-American Writing from Minnesota.”

She has guest-edited and contributed to special issues of Aster(ix) and Obsidian. Her work has also appeared in Small Axe, Art21, Something on Paper, Two Lines, and more.

The aim of her work is to open up space.