About
At home in a Brown body in New York City.
3issa is a multidimensional artist who engages in subversive, love-oriented creative practice. They have previously worked in visual arts (collage, drawing, installation), theatre, and dance.
3issa is a performance artist, mover, and creator based in New York City. They are originally from Miami, FL but completed their bachelor’s degree at colorado college (cc) after designing their own major in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies. In their time at cc, they performed in theatre, film, and dance, playing roles like Cathy in the Last 5 Years and choreographing their own movement and dance pieces that center Brown bodies and histories. They currently serve as an ensemble member to NYC’s Fresh Lime Soda Productions, Co., a subversive South Asian theatre collective founded by Kanika Vaish and Sabina Sethi Unni.
In their own work, they attempt to create worlds that work against normative, exploitative categorizations like race, gender, sex, genre, and nationality. Their work embraces the ambiguities and nuances of being human and focuses on imagination as a gateway past current knowledges, allowing for a more liberated future.
Currently, they teach movement classes that hold space for participants to move their bodies in their own unique ways, informed by their own spiritualities, ancestries, quotidian/day-to-day, and abilities. Through guiding prompts dealing with being gendered, feeling, physicality, and ghosts to list a few, they offer a movement space and tools for people - specifically those who are taught disembodiment - to connect to the fullness of their body. They believe allowing the body to exist in all its humanness can open up possibilities for self-love, community building, and anti-racism.
Outside the performance realm, they have served on the advisory board for the Trailhead Institute for sex education legislation in the state of Colorado, as well as have taught art-based sex ed through the Colorado Health Network. They have also conducted movement research with Pallavi Sriram exploring conceptions of time and magic in Afro-Asian literary traditions.