cat mahari in Residence September 2025
We are pleased to announce cat mahari will be in residence with the Speculative Play and Just Futurities program September 2025. During her time in Indianapolis, cat will research towards developing her Sugar in the Raw film project.
Nestled by the ecstatic communal of Chicago House and sensual partnership of Chicago Stepping, Sugar in the Raw is a journey of intimacy, trust, and touch in Blk Chicago.
Dovetailing with contemporary Blk Chicago cultural divergences as part of its process of resonance between the past, present, and future; the project journeys through surrealist animation, powerful vignettes, choreographic passages, archival footage and autobiographical interviews. Spanning multiple generations and crossing relationship paradigms, the film will be a performative tapestry of community through which changes strengthen bonds of commonality, and build on tension between individual expression and partnership.
About Cat Mahari
cat mahari's practice intersects movement, film, performance, installation, and experimental sound. Her rigorous approach offers critical reflexives on personal and collective architectonics.
cat’s most recent project is blk ark: the impossible manifestation (2022– 2024), performed at MCA-Chicago, Pact Zollverein, and CultureHub NYC, a triptych installation of movement, sound, and text on play and Hip Hop anarcho-choreographies. With a distinctive vision of interdisciplinary art-making, cat's awards include a 2025 Chicago Dancemakers Lab Award, 2024 DCASE Independent Artist Project grant, a 2023 MAP Fund Microgrant, 2022 Dance/USA Fellowship, and a 2021 3Arts Award.
As founder of the Art Omi: Blk, an international residency program supporting self-identified Black artists, she cultivates spaces for artists to expand their practices through experimentation and community dialogue. mahari is a long-time culture bearer of Hip Hop and House. Her interest lies in thinking through assumptive logics of emotional and psychomateriality. She considers the public-facing practice of her work to require a non-disciplinary imagined root, where she engages visibility through sound and movement as generative architectonics—material, social, and emotional. Her work examines the body as both source and conduit, shaped by lineages and improvisational rigor of the vernacular.
Information about cat mahari’s artwork and creative research is available at her website, catmahari.com.
Speculative Play and Just Futurities is made possible through the generous support of the Mellon Foundation. SPJF is a collaboration between the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, the Center for Africana Studies and Culture, and the Ray Bradbury Center. Learn more about the program here.