Kenyon Adams

NEH/Hannah Arendt Center Fellow

Biography: Kenyon Adams is the director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, New York, and a multimedia performance artist also known as little ray, a nom d’art inspired by a line in Dante’s Inferno about a little ray of light coming through a window in a prison tower. He previously served as director of the arts initiative at Grace Farms Foundation, an arts and cultural center in New Canaan, Connecticut. Adams studied religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, and theology of contemporary performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where he won the Director’s Prize for his presentation of the blues aesthetic as American lament. He also spent a year as artist in residence at the Institute. His performance work includes Prayers of the People, an interdisciplinary project marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , which was directed by Bill T. Jones and presented at the Fisher Center by New York Live Arts and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He made his feature film debut in Lee Isaac Chung’s 2010 feature Lucky Life, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and was selected for the Moscow International Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, and others.

MAR, Yale Divinity School; Certificate in theology of contemporary performance, Yale Institute of Sacred Music. At Bard: 2019–20.
Department: Hannah Arendt Center