Anna Martine Whitehead is a 2022–2024 Vera List Center Fellow whose fellowship project, FORCE! an opera in three acts, is part of the Vera List Center’s Focus Theme cycle Correction*.

FORCE! an opera in three acts is a Black femme story of interior lives and shared dreams. This project explores relationships blooming in the shadow of prisons, imagining a strange sisterhood with the power to disintegrate walls. Through sound, movement, and exploration of dreams with one another, we (those who are most impacted by these interlocking forces of oppression on which the prison industrial complex runs) put into practice the free world of our visions. In development since early 2020, FORCE! is a world-building project that manifests as a dance instruction manual, a live performance, and a co-thinking project to re-imagine theater and dance performance, centering care, consent, queer divergence, and Black femme rest. For the fellowship, Whitehead and collaborators develop FORCE! as a live show as well as body of work that proposes decolonial and abolition feminist art-making, particularly body-based (dance, theater, performance) practices.

Anna Martine Whitehead is a Virginia-raised Chicago-based performer, artist, and writer interested in Black queer temporalities. They have been presented by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; San José Museum of Art; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. They are a 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant recipient, 2020 Graham Foundation Fellow, and an awardee of a 2020 MAP Fund grant. And in 2022 they will be institutionally supported by the Rauschenberg Foundation and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, Frieze, Art Practical and Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017); and is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). They teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and organize with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts / Education Project.