Artist. Scholar.Strategist.
Long Biography
Ebony Noelle Golden unflinchingly pursues justice as an artist, scholar, and culture strategist. Hailing from Houston, TX, and currently living and working in Harlem, NY. She is the founder and CEO at Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, LLC. Since 2009, her collaborative has successfully supported organizational transformation and movement building for education, social justice, and cultural wellness campaigns and initiatives with some of the most forward-leaning institutions in the nation. Her creative, coaching and consulting work rely on transparent and equitable partnerships with community members, institutions, and artists actively working for justice and freedom today.
Golden’s creative practice is the foundation of her unique approach to devising justice and organizational wellness strategies. She also works as a community-based artist and attributes her ability to serve the needs of BDAC’s clients to a rigorous performance practice. As a poet, choreographer, and ritual performance artist, Ebony devises and directs site-specific ceremonies, live art installations, and environmental experiments that activate the throughline of Black liberation. In 2022, Ebony was awarded a fellowship from Princeton University's Entrepreneurship Council and Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2020, she launched Jupiter Performance Studio, which houses all of BDAC’s creative and arts education endeavors. Jupiter Performance Studio is a hub for the development, exploration, and production of diasporic Black performance traditions.
Her work embodies the power of art and collaboration as drivers of a movement for liberation. Golden’s approach to community arts, consulting, teaching and cultural organizing is steeped in the practices of Black women, activism, experimental performance and social/spirituality that honors and affirms self-actualized, self-determined, creative and liberated communities.
Ebony’s art-making and teaching centers cultural organizing, transformative movement building, Black feminism, womanism, ritual poetics, and public performance praxis. Most recently, she served as Visiting Associate Professor in Pratt’s Graduate Performance and Performance Studies Program and the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at New School. Golden holds degrees in poetry from Texas A & M University (B.A.) and American University (M.F.A.). She earned a M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University. She is a proud member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, Women of Color in the Arts, and Alternate Roots. Golden serves as an advisor for the National Dance Project at the New England Foundation for the Arts and a board member at Double Edge Theatre.
2023 Highlights
Awarded: NYTW Dartmouth Residency
Awarded: Company in Residence at New York Theatre Workshop
Curator/Artistic Director of the Arts and Survival Fellowship + Festival
Awarded: Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant
Awarded: NEFA Special Projects Grant (Art and Survival Festival)
Awarded: Yaddo Artist Residency
Awarded: MacDowell Fellowship
Awarded: LMCC/UMEZ Grants
2022 Highlights
Awarded: START Entrepreneurship Fellowship at Princeton University
Awarded: Visionary Practice Award by Association for Theatre in Higher Education
Awarded: National Theatre Project Creation & Touring Grant by New England Foundation for the Arts
2021 Highlights
Awarded: NYSCA Grant
2020 Highlights
Appointed: New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission
Appointed: New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Advisor
Awarded: Sky Lab Artist in Residence at Hi-Arts
Awarded: Black Spatial Relics Micro-Grant
Awarded: Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Covid-19 Grant
Awarded: Opportunity Agenda Emergency Covid-19 Grant
Awarded: Dance/NYC Coronavirus Dance Relief Fund Grant
Awarded: Creative Capital Award for Jubilee 11213
Awarded: Network of Ensemble Theatre Grant
Awarded + Commissioned: Residency at Weeksville Heritage Center for the development and world premier of Jubilee 11213
Commissioned: Apollo Theatre New Works for the development and world premier of In The Name Of…
Launched: Jupiter Performance Studio (JPS) which serves as a low-residency hub for the study and performance of diasporic black performance traditions. JPS is integral to the development and premiere of five theatrical ceremonies that will be developed and produced over the next three years with partners in Harlem, Brooklyn, Durham, and Ashfield, Massachusetts
Abundance is our birthright.
Short Biography
Ebony Noelle Golden is a theatrical ceremonialist, culture strategist, entrepreneur, and public scholar. In 2009, Ebony founded Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative, a culture consultancy that devises systems, strategies, and social justice solutions nationally. In 2020, she founded Jupiter Performance Studio, a space to study and practice Black diasporic performance traditions. Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Transformational Practice Award, Golden works to incite and ignite the creative capacity of everyday folks in service of liberation and collective wellbeing. Her practice is rooted in community-design, ritual performance, and leadership development through a womanist and Black feminist praxis. Invoking messy, magical, and medicinal processes, Ebony and her collaborators, work to conjure a better world. www.bettysdaughterarts.com IG: @ebonynoellegolden