GODBODY: Creating Without Shame Artist Panel

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"What does it mean to birth a body free of shame?" explore, across mediums, the process and embodiment of creating queer Black art. Creating Without Shame Artist Panel Hosted by TTO’s Des Bennett, This interdisciplinary artist panel will feature artist bashexo in conversation with Diovanna Obafunmilayo to explore, across mediums, the process and embodiment of creating queer Black art. Audiences will be invited to take part in a community-art making activity that will be on display as part of the Exhibition. *The exhibition is the accompanying work of the ritual opera and is on display at the Multicultural Art Center daily from October 20, 2026 - November 27, 2026.* About Godbody There are two key components to Godbody: performances November 13th & 14th and an exhibition of artwork on view through November 29 at the Multicultural Arts Center. This ticketing page is for the artist panel November 14th only. To attend the performance, please secure tickets through the event collection. Participate in the Ritual As part of this exhibition event, Diovanna Obafunmilayo invites audiences to be part of the ritual of GODBODY by engaging in the practice of live-art making. Through leaving impressions of their own body in oil pastel, strangers and friends alike create a group signature that they were here, a guestbook that becomes part of the larger body of work itself. Additional Activity Days: Thursday, October 22nd | Public Opening Friday, November 13 | Godbody Performance @ 8pm Saturday, November 14 | Godbody Performance & Talk-Back @ 2pm Des Bennett (they/them/theirs) | Panel Facilitator Des Bennett is a Black trans cultural worker, dramaturg, director, facilitator, and producer whose work emphasizes creativity and storytelling as central to community care, social wellness, and QTBIPOC liberation. Their work and methods take inspiration and strategy from Black and queer revolutionary artists, disability justice & AIDS/COVID activism, civic design, and living archives to bridge the past and present, to imagine liberated futures dreamed up in sewing circles. Des is the Associate Director of Queer (Re)Public Programs at The Theater Offensive, where they create and facilitate radical creative spaces for creating art, healing, and resource sharing for QTBIPOC community. They are the facilitator and producer of TTO’s Emergent Artist Residency Program, focused solely on on developing new work from QTBIPOC artists. Their own mixed media artistic work touches the precipice of contradictions of human experience: fear and desire, surrealism and reality, hope and despair, oppression and liberation. bashexo (ze/zim/zirs & they/them/theirs) | Panelist bashexo was born and raised in south philly, pa. and currently lives in providence, ri. ze is a black trans non-binary transdisciplinary installation|movement performance creative who blends race & queer theory w/African diasporic spiritual traditions & aesthetics. zir’s creative practice is a care conjuring practice, inspired by the poetics of blackness and black queer aliveness. bashexo creates objects, immersive spaces, performances, and workshops that center the exploration of blackness| black queerness within ritualized liberatory care frameworks. zir’s socio-creative framework is rooted in ancestral reverence, feminism, queer theory, research, collectivity, love, experimentation, desire and other healing technologies. bashexo intentionally embraces multinodal and super-temporal relationships among ancestral wisdom, nature, black futurity, somatics, and liberation in order to create worlds (albeit temporaneously) where blackness and black queer folx can be, heal, and thrive. In addition to ze's personal creative practice, bashexo is the co-founding member of unboundbodies art collective, a core member of the hotbits collective, member of playchurch co-op, and co-founder of variable (n). Diovanna Obafunmilayo Frazier (she/her/hers) | GODBODY Conceiver Diovanna Obafunmilayo Frazier is a multimedia performance artist, Grammy-nominated songwriter, award-winning filmmaker, and poet, from Virginia Beach. Her major choreographic debut came in music video for Kehlani's "Altar." Her songwriting debut began with the gold-certified "After Hours." Her debut experimental dance poetry film, "When We Arrive As Flowers," has been screened at over 25 film festivals since its debut in 2022. Based in New York, she continues to produce work that fuses all of these creative practices under an umbrella of spirituality, liberation, inspiration, and women's empowerment. Godbody: a ritual opera, by Diovanna Obafunmilayo Frazier GODBODY asks the central question, "What does it mean to birth a body free of shame?" With this as its foundation, the series engages the body as a site of emotional processing and vessel for the divinity of self. The rich symbolism and philosophy of the AfroCuban religion, La Regla de Ocha Lukumí, become the spiritual technology with which Diovanna Obafunmilayo engages herself. Existing joyously, and in the process, conjuring a new sense of personhood, is the imperative. The series was made in the development process of the evening-length performance, GODBODY, a ritual opera, with the support of the Center for Performance Research and The Theater Offensive.

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