Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a National Poetry Slam champion, Broadway veteran, GOLDIE award winner, featured artist on the past two seasons of Russell Simmons' Def Poetry on HBO and inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. Originally from New York City and currently living in Oakland, California, this acclaimed arts activist has toured in recent years through Tokyo where he was presented during the 1st International Spoken Word Festival and to Santiago de Cuba where he joined the legendary Katherine Dunham as a part of the CubaNola Collective.
Bamuthi entered the world of literary performance after crossing the sands of “traditional” theater, most notably on Broadway in the Tony Award winning The Tap Dance Kid and Stand-Up Tragedy. His most recent work, “the break/s” (June 2008) has been acclaimed as a new level of hip-hop theatre. A mixtape for the stage, the break/s” is a multimedia infused theatrical journey and international travel diary across planet hip hop, based on Can’t Stop Won’t Stop by Jeff Chang. The subject is the fate of hip-hop in a world slipping ever more into globalization. He developed this piece while completing the prestigious Arts Institute Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
In 2007, his work, Scourge, was presented internationally in Belgium, Italy and Netherlands. The performance reflects on the plight of Haiti in the post-colonial New World, and was developed while Bamuthi was a Phillis Wattis Artist-in-Residence at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Collaborators for Scourge include renowned choreographer Rennie Harris, Grammy-nominated composer John Santos, dramaturg Roberta Uno, and director Kamilah Forbes of the New York City Hip Hop Theater Festival.
His evening-length work Word Becomes Flesh represents the completion of his third play, having staged De/Cipher (Theater Artaud and Yerba Buena Center, 2001) and No Man's Land (ODC, 2002). Word Becomes Flesh has found a home in the seasons of Seattle’s On The Boards, Houston’s Diverse Works, Washington, D.C.’s Dance Place and New York’s Dance Theater Workshop among other national venues.
Bamuthi’s work has been described as everything from “electrifying” (The Houston Chronicle), to “ever-elegant” (The Washington Post) and has compelled The Seattle Times to name him their “cutting edge performer of the year” for 2003. In their review of Word Becomes Flesh, the New York Times declared his work to be “eloquent. . .seamless. . .and remarkable.”
Bamuthi's performance schedule has carried him from dance apprenticeships in Senegal to teaching fellowships in Bosnia. His proudest work has been with the organization Youth Speaks where he mentors 13-19 year old writers and curates the Living Word Festival for Literary Arts. He recently served as an IDA resident artist in Stanford University's Drama Department, teaching Spoken Word and Community Action.
Since beginning a career in performance poetry in the Fall of 1998, Bamuthi has been San Francisco's Poetry Grand Slam winner three times, won the 1999 National Poetry Slam with Team San Francisco, and founded “Second Sundays,” the nation's first monthly spoken word gathering to generate audiences of 500+. His local work earned him a GOLDIE award from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of only seven awards given per year by the staff of the Bay Area's largest independent weekly. Nationally, he has been a featured lecturer and performance artist at more than one hundred colleges and universities including UC Berkeley, NYU, Brown University, the University of Michigan, Bates College, Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
He has done several performances with the current stars of the Spoken Word and music scene including: Ben Harper, De La Soul, The Roots, Bonnie Raitt, Saul Williams, Cody Chestnutt, Beau Sia, Blackalicious, Will Power, Jill Scott, Mos Def, Sarah Jones, Sonia Sanchez, Gil Scott Heron, The Last Poets, Amiri Baraka, Roger Bonair-Agard, Ishle Yi Park, Danny Hoch and many others. In addition, he's released a spoken word CD, “Seeking,” worked with Linkin Park's Joe Hahn for MTV, and performs on the CD “185 Progress Drive” (Alternative Tentacles Records: 2000) with Assata Shakur, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Bob Marley, Michael Franti, I was Born with Two Tongues and other hip hop and spoken word artists.
Bamuthi’s critical writing is currently featured in Jeff Chang’s Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. His first non-fiction book, Line Breaks: A Source Guide to Hip Hop Theater, will be published by The University of Wisconsin Press in 2008.
Bamuthi is proud to serve as the Artistic Director of Youth Speaks/ The Living Word project where he curates the Living Word Festival for Literary Arts.
