Armond Dorsey

Armond (They/he) is a world-builder and interdisciplinary artist-researcher who synthesizes storytelling across artistic mediums with research to deeply inquire “why not be free?”. Their creative work builds dream-like worlds as rituals for healing, social spaces fostering interconnection, and sites of fugitivity away from global antiBlackness. Armond immerses audiences into live performance, installation, and theater settings to experience these worlds otherwise. They suspend audiences in these Afrosurrealist sites where Black joy and Black life are uninterrupted using poems expanded into narrative soundscapes and plays. Born and raised in Prince George’s County, MD, Armond amplifies intergenerational memory within their Black communities and the African diaspora at-large by drawing from archives and field recordings of the narratives Black folks have lived and continue living. Deeply listening to these narratives grounds their practice as a performer-composer, poet, and theater artist. Through his arts intervention praxis, Armond merges his creative practice with research across Black feminist and Womanist thought, music cognition, and public health not only to develop music interventions and research methods against stress but also to foster collective well-being in Black communities.

Recent commissions and festival performances include: New Amsterdam Records Composer Lab, Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency #191, Dramatic Question Theater’s PlayTime Workshop, New York Theater Workshop Company-in-Residence (JAG Productions, Production Dramaturg); International Contemporary Ensemble’s Ensemble Evolution; Dartmouth College’s New Music Festival; New Media, Arts, and Sound Festival; Nief-Norf Summer Festival; and, the Frost & Dodd Playwriting Festival.

Armond is passionate about spreading knowledge among artists and care practitioners on how creative approaches integrating music with mindfulness practices and Black communities’ lived experiences with stress can improve Black communities’ health across the African Diaspora. Their research has been published in Molecular Carcinogenesis and the Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice; their contributions to a leading clinical neurology and epilepsy research study at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center are acknowledged in Acta Neurologica. Armond holds both a M.A. in Digital Musics and a B.A. in Music modified with Neuroscience with a minor in African and African-American Studies from Dartmouth College: armonddorsey.com