Yao Kahlil Newkirk is a multidisciplinary artist-scholar, educator, keynote speaker, director, and creator of The EMBODY Praxis™, an embodied framework bridging performance, pedagogy, Black cultural memory, and transformational learning. His work exists at the intersection of art, education, embodiment, and social inquiry, using performance as a space for reflection, embodied inquiry, critical engagement, and collective transformation.

Through keynote lectures, lecture-performances, workshops, residencies, and community engagement, Yao collaborates with universities, cultural institutions, organizations, and communities seeking deeper approaches to learning, leadership, creativity, and human connection. His work challenges audiences to move beyond passive observation toward embodied participation, reflection, and dialogue.

Yao is a PhDc in Africana & American Studies, an M.A. in Theatre Performance, and a B.A. in Theatre from the University at Buffalo. His academic experience includes teaching in Africana & American Studies at the University at Buffalo and serving as an Adjunct Professor of Theatre & Dance at SUNY Fredonia. His scholarship examines embodiment, racial trauma, Black cultural memory, ritual, performance pedagogy, and the relationship between lived experience and learning. He is also a co-author of “Performing Cohorts,” published in Performance Pedagogy: Objects, Transfers, Formations by Bloomsbury Publishing.

As Founder and Artistic Director of Black Feather Theatre Company, Yao develops interdisciplinary work rooted in Black expressive traditions, ritual, storytelling, and contemporary performance practice. His creative work spans theatre, performance art, installation, choreography, music, and interdisciplinary performance. Selected works include the year-long durational performance Separation Anxiety; Queen Mary’s Roundtable; Facing Our Truth; Pipeline; A Raisin in the Sun; Just Black; Now You See Me; and the installation I Wish a N^gg@ Would. His broader performance career has included work at the Apollo Theater and performances connected with the American Music Awards and a presidential inaugural event.

His one-year durational performance, Separation Anxiety, created in honor of Trayvon Martin and every victim of lynching both present and past, became a sustained exploration of endurance, visibility, grief, racial trauma, memory, and embodied witnessing. The work helped shape the continued development of EMBODY Praxis™ as both an artistic and pedagogical framework.

Yao's public scholarship also extends into Black history and cultural memory. His research on his ancestor Peyton Harris examines the journey of a formerly enslaved man who became an entrepreneur and influential community figure in nineteenth-century Buffalo. He has presented historical research through conferences, museums, libraries, and public-humanities settings, bringing archival research into conversation with family history, performance, and contemporary questions of memory and legacy.

Across his scholarship, teaching, performance, and public engagement, Yao's work asks a central question: What becomes possible when knowledge is not only studied, but embodied? His work continues to create spaces where artistic practice, cultural memory, critical reflection, and lived experience become catalysts for learning, transformation, and cultural imagination.