A b o u t
Jillian Walker :: Gogo Yema, is a multidimensional artist (composer, playwright, performer, vocalist, dramaturg), diviner, healer, teacher, and Sangoma Priestess. She is the Founding Artist and Studio Mother of Legasea, a sacred healing house, ancestral studio and High Art imprint for humans of radical possibility.
With her spiritual practice as the central portal, she has created and supported over a decade of art in the fields of theater and performance, music, film, television, as well as throughout the academy, in healing spaces, women’s circles, prisons, places of worship, and sacred spaces at and across the oceans.
Gogo comes from a lineage of teachers, healers and community builders and is rooted in her midwestern US upbringing, her red-dirt southern great-great and 3rd great grandparents, and the ancient ancestors of Southern Africa who called her to initiate and reclaim the medicines and Songs of her people.
She blesses the honor of her lineages through performance and practice. Her most acclaimed work, SKiNFoLK: An American Show (The Bushwick Starr/National Black Theatre: NY Times Critics Pick, Kilroys List, Lilly Award) is forthcoming from 53rd State Press. Her other plays and projects have received numerous honors and include Songs of Speculation (JACK, 2020 Third Coast Audio Unbound Award) and Sarah’s Salt.(Winner Columbia@Roundabout, Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist, Relentless Award honorable mention).
One of Gogo’s favorite descriptions of her onstage work comes from Poet and Prophet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who described her Joe’s Pub concert, Blue Ink, as “Transformational, Black feminist, ancestral-portal-opening, love-centered musical work.”
With her multifaceted training and education in traditional academic spaces (BA: The University of Michigan, MFA: Columbia University) and ancient afro-indigenous traditions (Chief teachers, Makhosi Himi Gogo Thule Ngane, Queen Baba Solstice Kha Ekhaya Esima, Makhosi Foundation), Jillian :: Gogo holds a unique combination of intellectual curiosity, spiritual rigor and an incredible capacity for deep listening and collaboration with people, built and natural worlds, time/space, Ancestors and all of the unseen.
Some of Gogo’s favorite collaborations include: writing/performing and serving as Process Director with The TEAM (Reconstructing), creating Move, Meditate, Make with Libby King, working as a setlist dramaturg on Common’s Let Love tour, serving as dramaturg of divinity on the second season of Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness (HBO), holding prompt-based performance classes with the students at The University of Washington and Harvard, holding circle with the women in Nisha Moodley’s Soul of Leadership, and sitting in prayer, song and healing space with her spiritual family at the Makhosi Foundation.
BLK GRK (or, hiding in plain sight), a multiversal, poetic exploration of the history of Black Greek Letter Organizations, is a deep upcoming collaboration with co-conceivers, Rachel Chavkin and Eric Berryman, and has expanded Jillian into its screenwriter, composer and star, alongside Eric Berryman.
Her latest onstage script(ure), The Whitney Album, appeared in Soho Rep’s ’22-’23 season.
From a heartspace that flows out of The Love of the Ancestors, she incites and inspires sublime new forms of art, structures, and communal systems that break the brutal boundaries of the colonial imagination.
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Photo Creds:
:: Header photo by co-star, Eric Berryman, from the set of BLK GRK, or Hiding in Plain Sight.
:: Watermark: a black and white photo of Jillian in a performance of her work, Surrender, is the Night. Photograph by Marika Kent.
:: Pictured below : a black and white photo of Jillian in a performance of her original work, Surrender, is the Night. Photograph by Marika Kent.
Excerpted works
artist visits and lectures
-2023
