Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, born in 1975 to Haitian immigrant parents, is a spoken-word poet, dancer, playwright, and actor who grew up in Laurelton, Queens, New York City. He works extensively in hip-hop theater, frequently directing stand-alone productions in that form.

Joseph's connection to Broadway began unusually early. At age 10, he served as Savion Glover's tap dancing understudy in the musical The Tap Dance Kid, marking his Broadway debut. By the time he was 12, he had also appeared on television and completed a national tour with the production. He later attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he participated in the spoken word movement alongside classmate Saul Williams, graduating in 1997. Following graduation, he was hired by The Branson School to teach English and dance.

His professional career expanded rapidly in the late 1990s. In 1998, he worked with the Senegalese National Ballet. The following year, he became National Poetry Slam champion as part of the San Francisco team and took on the role of Arts in Education Director at Youth Speaks, eventually rising to Artistic Director. In that capacity, he helped name and establish the Brave New Voices Festival and Network. During this period he also collaborated with Katherine Dunham, Joe Hahn, Mos Def, and Bonnie Raitt.

In 2003, Joseph debuted Word Becomes Flesh, a choreo-poem examining love, fatherhood, and legacy. His work appeared in episodes of Russell Simmons' Def Poetry on HBO in both 2004 and 2005. In 2006, he presented Scourge, a hip-hop, spoken word, and dance performance reflecting on Haiti's history and future, created in collaboration with choreographers Rennie Harris and Adia Whitaker and directed by Kamilah Forbes. That same year he received both a Creative Capital Award and a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. He appeared on the cover of Smithsonian Magazine in the fall of 2007. Two of his works were featured at the Humana Festival of New American Plays: the break/s in 2008 and Chicago, Sudan in 2011.

Joseph co-founded the Life is Living Festival for Youth Speaks and created the installation Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos for Creative Time. In 2011, he premiered the dance theater piece Red, Black & Green, a collaboration with artist Theaster Gates, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and received the Herb Alpert Award in Theatre that same year. In February 2012, he joined YBCA as Director of Performing Arts. While there, he conceptualized the YBCA 100, an annual list of 100 change makers, along with the YBCA 100 Summit, and developed the YBCA Fellows Program for San Francisco Bay Area creatives. He also received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2012. Joseph departed his role as Chief of Program and Pedagogy at YBCA at the end of 2018.

Throughout the 2010s, Joseph collaborated twice with composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain. In 2016, the two toured their joint concert Blackbird, Fly. Their subsequent collaboration, We Shall Not Be Moved, was commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and featured Roumain's composition alongside Joseph's opera libretto; The New York Times named it one of the best classical music performances of 2017. The Kennedy Center commissioned Joseph to write /peh- / in 2017, a play exploring black life and egalitarianism through the lens of futbol, which toured North America for three years, including a run at BAM's Harvey Theater as part of the 2017 Next Wave Festival. He was named a 2016 recipient of the Guggenheim Museum Social Practice initiative and a 2017 TED Global Fellow. His piece The Just and the Blind, which examines over-sentencing in the prison industrial complex, premiered at Carnegie Hall in March 2019.

In January 2019, Joseph became Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. That same year, he appeared on Broadway in Freestyle Love Supreme. He has performed at the Kennedy Center on multiple prior occasions, including the 2013 One Mic Hip Hop Culture Worldwide festival, a 2014 presentation of Red, Black & Green: A Blues, and a 2018 live performance of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

Joseph moved to Oakland in 2001. He is married to Kanoelani Connor Joseph, an elementary school teacher who holds a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Master of Arts in education from the University of San Francisco. The couple has a son and a daughter.