bio

Adrienne Jacobson Oliver is an artist-researcher living and working on Monacan land at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the American South. Through speculative methodologies blending poetry, performance, and visual art, her creative practice addresses how B/blackness articulates itself in vernacular, sensual, and sonic forms, exploring resonance with/in blackened histories. Adrienne’s writing orchestrates 'Sankofic attunement'—a critically erotic composition of B/black maternality in the afterlives of reproductive enslavement.

Having trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts before studying film and media theory at the University of Virginia, she holds an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Adrienne is a 2024-25 Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program and Director of New Works at Live Arts Theater in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Her work was previously supported by PEN America, Tin House, Burnaway, and the National Endowment for the Arts and has appeared in The Plentitudes, Apogee Journal, Puerto del Sol, and the Virginia Film Festival.