Gabrielle Civil is a Black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer originally from Detroit, Michigan. She has premiered more than 50 original solo and collaborative performance works around the world. Civil is the author of the memoirs Swallow the Fish (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017), Experiments in Joy (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2019), and The Déjà Vu: Black Dreams & Black Time (Coffee House Press, 2022). In these texts, Civil blends performance, memoir, critical analysis, prose, poetry, collaboration, and collective artmaking.

Alongside Madhu H. Kaza and Rosamond S. King, Civil founded No. 1 Gold, which was active in the late 1990s through the mid 2000s. According to the collective’s website, No. 1 Gold was a “creative laboratory for race, creative writing, conceptual and performance art.” Since May 2014, Civil has been performing Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls), which she describes “as an act of embodied remembering.” 

Civil’s chapbook ( ghost gestures ) was selected by Bhanu Kapil as the winner of Gold Line Press’s 2019 Nonfiction Chapbook Contest. Her art writing has appeared in The Third Rail, Art21, Small Axe, and Obsidian. Her essays and translations have appeared in Something on Paper, Aster(ix), and Two Lines. She was named a 2019 Los Angeles Rema Hart Mann Emerging Artist.

Civil teaches performance memoir, art and activism, and more in the MFA in Creative Writing and the BFA program in Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. Previously, she taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Civil earned a PhD in comparative literature from NYU. Her dissertation focused on the poetry of Black women in the United States, Canada, and Haiti.