About Jemma Desai
(she/her) – London, UK – Artist/Cultural Worker. Hosted by BAM.
Jemma Desai is a cultural worker across film, visual arts and performance and a somatic facilitator working with individuals and groups. Her work attempts a committed engagement with decolonial and abolitionist scholarship and praxis and through this, considers the gap between intention and practice in imagining, making, and circulating culture. Working through, or close to the body, her work encompasses first person writing and performance, as well as material and social practices to form an embodied archive of desires for change, belonging, and being longing. She is a practice-based PhD candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama with a thesis entitled “what do we want from each other after we have told our stories?”. The title gestures towards the proliferation of personal testimony in cultural production and the contested, yet always entangled relationship between individual and collective in movements of social change.