Adrienne Oliver is building worlds through nurture and poetics.
A highly intellectual and charismatic artist, emergent independent curator, and equity-minded cultural critic practicing deep thinking and radical joy. Adrienne believes our work as creators and citizens is to champion transformation and unsung stories. Across sectors, she is a purpose-driven creative strategist, keen-eyed visual artist, and savvy project director who increasingly leads collectives to more challenging goals. With a nearly two-decade history of driving cultural enrichment, Adrienne fosters partnerships and advances missions through dynamic collaboration.
James Baldwin notes, 'Life offers you the choice, and it's a very narrow choice, of holding on to your definition of yourself or saying, as the old folks used to say, and as everybody who wants to live has to say: Yes, Lord.'
In this succinct summary, he encapsulates the essence of transformation and similarly easily defines Adrienne’s approach to collaborative, creative, and strategic leadership: fluidity, and the routine embracement of elasticity, navigational capital, and flexible, intuitive engagement across stakeholder parties. This is the essence of her work in all projects: a translation of humanity, across time and difference, into a known and keenly felt shared language.
Across sectors, Adrienne’s essential task has been cultivating human-centered spaces of critical analysis, deep reflection, and expanded capacity. She says yes! to the width of human experience, its immensity, and unfolding. She is uniquely primed for such alchemistic thinking; she has always been a soul celebratory of evolution and is uncommonly adept at synthesizing energies in order to ride the winds of evolution.
An MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago currently based in central Virginia, Adrienne seeks creative leadership roles, artistic development, and is available for contract positions.
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A 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, Adrienne is devoted to her craft and development, and is a burgeoning curator determined to pursue artistic growth, multidisciplinary creation, and research/teaching opportunities in the longterm. current work.
With a nearly two-decade history of life and work in and about the American South, my long-standing partnerships with area nonprofits and statewide relationships with Virginian and Chicagoan artists, teachers, galleries, movements, and social issues inform my commitment to the regions, and prepare me to hit the ground running. I'm equipped and desirous for the opportunity to pour into visions rooted in growth, interdisciplinary thinking, and responsive community engagement. I seek to synthesize my singular perspective in service of dynamic program/artistic management roles and would relish a position expanding an organization’s spaces, exhibitions, and dialogues to amplify connectivity and progress. I am undaunted and ignited by change, and I thrive in institutions desirous of such imagination.
#amwriting:
The Architecture of Memory, a choreopoem exploring the intersection of Black Southern American womanhood and indigeneity, investigating the performance and radicalizing nature of Black motherhood. While considering Audre Lorde’s call to lay down the master’s tools in favor of a more erotic (somatic, sensual, intimate) effort toward liberation, at heart, this work is in conversation with Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly, a fantastical folktale depicting the self-liberation of enslaved people through their resilient magic and collective action.
MFA Candidate, Studio Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Community Scholar, Media Studies & Studio Art, University of Virginia
Bachelor of Science, Communication Studies, Excelsior College
Associate of Arts, Performance, American Academy of Dramatic Arts
Education
2024
2010
2006
Fellow, Burnaway Art Writing Incubator
Fellow, Unsettling Grounds Project, NEA + The Bridge Progressive Arts Institute
Fellow, PEN America Emerging Voices, Poetry
Culturally Proficient Coaching, Albemarle County Public Schools
joyful news
Reading your words always feels like it belongs inside of a ritual. I see you in my inbox, brew a cup of tea, pull a blanket over my lap and read. And something of what you've shared always lingers. As I'm going about my day its echo will find me.
— Satya Nelms, Writer & Community Builder, Host of ‘Our Mothers’ Gardens’
Oh, Adrienne. Your presence, perspective, words, and approach have had such a profound impact on me. Thank you, thank you, for all that you shared and do and are.
— Sara Weinreb, Writer & Founder, IMBY
