D. Denenge

D. Denenge is a transnational “space sculptor,” whose award-winning teaching, art, and writing bridge modalities of ritual, design, ecology, and Afrofuturity. Her practice reflects an ongoing engagement with site and body; visibility and disability; phenomenology and mythology; and the politics of Black femme labor and identity within and outside of institutional spaces. With cross-disciplinary practice as a foundational value and methodology, her works are rooted in art historical excavation and reclamation, expressed via photography, garment, synesthetic sculpture, digital experimentation, sonic intervention, and audience-interactive performance-activations honoring the poetics and sacred systems of African and Indigenous traditions. 

Her projects consider the poetics of trace under the frame of Pastoral Brutalism, charting a sensual scholarly engagement with architectures and nature-based environments as a return to embrace the haptic role of shapeshifter, modes of healing and protection, fantasy excavation, and expanded forms of archive and memoir.

Denenge is an Afrofuturism design consultant and curator and the founder of Denenge Design, focused on holistic, conceptual approaches to human-centered design. She is a 2024 Jnane Tamsna Creative-in-Residence and CAD+SR Laboratory for Planetary Arts Fellow, 2022 La Becque Laureate, 2016-17 Place Lab Fellow with Rebuild Foundation/University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and 2014 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow.

She holds the position of Associate Professor, Adj. as Core Faculty in the Low-Residency MFA Program founded by Gregg Bordowitz under the pedagogical umbrella of Poetics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has created many new cross-disciplinary courses including Take Root Among the Stars: The Legacy of Octavia Butler, Surviving the 21st Century & Beyond, Afrofuturity, Afrofuturist Ecologies, Constructing Future Forms, Power to the People: Revolution and the Black Arts Movement, Sculpting Space: Design, Architecture, and Sacred Systems in Africa and the Diaspora, and Black World Ritual Art Performance. She was awarded the 2018 Marion Kryczka Excellence in Teaching Award, the student-nominated 2016 DAG Inaugural Teaching Award for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion, and 2021 Nexus Team Teaching Award. Denenge lectures globally including at Victoria and Albert Museum London, Wellesley College, Goethe Institut, Zurich University of the Arts, F+F Zurich, Columbia College Chicago, Kentucky College of Art & Design, and other esteemed national and community institutions.

Denenge's work has been presented at venues including: Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London with Black Quantum Futurism; Corpus Meum interactive sound installation at Arts Club of Chicago; ARTEXTE, Montréal; Becoming Interplanetary/Decolonizing Mars, U.S. Library of Congress; Red Bull Arts NY for No Guts, No Galaxy series with exhibition Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, NYC audience activation with Nyugen Smith on the historic Rivers cosmogram by Houston Conwill, inaugurated in 1991 with the jitterbug by Black Arts Movement co-founder Amiri Baraka and poet Maya Angelou; invited contributing artist to Theaster Gates: How to Build a House Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario (exhibition catalog named one of Culture Type's top art books of 2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Le CALM, Lausanne.

Publications include: commissioned essay on AFRICOBRA co-founder Jae Jarrell, Kavi Gupta Editions for the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019; Africa Fashion (V&A Museum); Fly Me to the Moon, Kunsthaus Zürich; Connecting Afro Futures. Fashion x Hair x Design, Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin; Vegetal Entwinements (MIT Press); Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (UK); Fleeting Monuments (U-Minn Press); AFRIFUTURI 02022020 monograph self-published with launch of the Camo Coat Collection; ARTNews; Newsweek, in addition to radio and television appearances including Radio 40 with Noémi Michel via Arsenic Lausanne. Selected collections include Peggy Cooper Cafritz Collection, Studio Museum in Harlem, MFA Boston, National Art Library of V&A, London, and numerous private collections.