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Bio
Marsae Lynette is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, specializing in Environmental Humanities and Policy, and a 2025–2026 Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) Graduate Research Fellow. An interdisciplinary artist-scholar, choreographer, theater maker, and educator, she holds an MFA from the University of Michigan with a focus in Art Entrepreneurship and Leadership.
Her dissertation-in-progress, Performing Preservation: Choreographing Resilience, Restoration, and Cultural Transformation, develops the AARCC method (Acknowledge, Activate, Refine, Ceremony, Continue) as a decolonial, performance-based framework for cultural transformation toward ecological restoration. Grounded in Ecowomanist theory and Indigenous epistemologies, her work engages ritual, water, and cultural memory to cultivate ecological empathy and community-centered practices of care.
Lynette’s choreopoems and award-winning films—including Astoria Film Festival’s Best Experimental Short—have been presented internationally. She has been a guest artist with Sankofa Danzafro in Colombia, performing in Geografías Líquidas in Cali and Medellín, and has presented her research at the Black Arts Consortium’s Black Ecologies Institute. Her teaching includes work with Detroit Public Schools, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and service as Instructor of Record at the University of Michigan. Across scholarship, performance, and pedagogy, Lynette’s praxis moves with the intention to ethically engage, to empower through remembrance and creativity, and to educate toward more just and harmonious horizons.
Artist Statement
“Art making is world making. Art making can galvanize people. It can move people to action. Art making can compel the masses toward new senses of truth.”
— Ismatu Gwendolyn
As an Afro-Indigenous creator from Flint, Michigan, my artistic practice is rooted in the understanding that performance can be both a vessel of ancestral knowledge and a tool for ecological healing. In my work citation, dance, poetry, theater, music, and film become living technologies for ancestral transmission, radical imagination, and ecological repair. These mediums allow for transdisciplinary storytelling that honors and archives ancestral knowledge while creating imaginative, harmonious “altar futures”.
As filmmaker, friend, and interlocutor bree gant once shared, “Art is a way of accessing alternate knowledge forms. Collaboration is essential to knowledge production. Filmmaking and editing is a process of analysis that creates and transfers knowledge. I am made of the people who existed before me, film allows me to archive ancestral embodied knowledge to pass on to those who will come after me.” Film making is therefore an inter-generational inter-dimensional art form; a temporal crossroad and creative collaboration with the past, present, and future -giving honor to Elegua the Orisha of crossroads.
Ritual is central to my process. I treat performance as ceremony, a communal rite that can cleanse, conjure, and catalyze transformation. My artistic practice emerges from and returns to community. I work with elders, knowledge keepers, and collaborators across Black and Indigenous diasporas to develop performance rituals that honor the Earth as both ancestor and archive. I make work to shift what communities can feel, remember, and do together because, as Toni Cade Bambara reminds us, “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” I see performance not as metaphor, but as method, capable of both restoration and transformation.
Sun Ra’s concept of alter destiny clarifies my artistic horizon. Rather than accepting “history” as a closed script, alter destiny names a practice of refusing inherited trajectories and moving toward the unknown as a survival strategy—an imaginative technology for stepping outside someone else’s story and composing another set of coordinates. I work with sound, image, and movement to create those jolts of perception—moments when a room can feel time bend, when a chorus becomes a portal, when a body remembers what colonial institutions trained it to forget.
As a founding member of the AARCC Coalition (Artist Alliance for Revolutionary Care and Creativity) I co-create sanctuaries for artists and thinkers committed to resisting systemic harm and reimagining the future through communal care and cultural work. My commitment to collective liberation extends beyond the stage and into classrooms, protests, gardens, and ceremonies. My work strives to imagine and materialize new harmonious worlds where memory is protected and the Earth is honored — making the revolution not just irresistible but inevitable.
