Baker Artist Portfolios

Denise Kumani Gantt makes work that inhabits the body before it lives on the page or stage. A poet, playwright, digital storyteller, and interdisciplinary performance artist rooted in the African Diaspora and Yoruba tradition, she has spent over thirty years creating theater that holds contradiction--giving full voice to the stories a word too often asks Black women to simplify, silence, or surrender. Her plays have been produced at Baltimore Theatre Project, Artscape, the New York Drama League, Penumbra Theatre, and the New York International Fringe Festival. She won the Artscape Best New Play Contest and the 2003 Maryland Emerging Voices Award for her poetry collection, conjuring the dead. A MacDowell Fellow, she has been in residence at Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center, and internationally at Sangam House (India) and Fiskars Village (Finland). She currently serves as the Director of Education at Lyric Baltimore, where she created the annual Dream Big Contest. She also works as a digital storytelling facilitator for StoryCenter, Canada.