Jô Osbórnia

Jô Osbórnia (she/her) is a poet, performer, translator, and curator from Rio de Janeiro. She has been living in Berlin for six years, to which she migrated with a scholarship from Haus für Poesie/Poesie Festival Berlin after Brazil’s 2016 coup d’état. In her artistic works, Jô is interested in questions of gender and colonialism. From her position as a migrant travesti in Europe, she intends to reflect on poetic and performative languages that might imply anti-colonial thinking/attitudes within the metropolis. She has participated in residencies at Thessaloniki Queer Art Festival (2019), where she conducted the series of creative writing workshops Kuir Trauma and Poetry and (Re)Writing Kuir Mythologies for young adults; and at Fundaziun Nairs in Scuol (2020), where she presented a performance entitled Anti-kolonialer Sündenbock. Her works have been presented at Poesie Festival Berlin (2020, video poem Eü), at Goethe-Institut Barcelona (2021, video poem The monolith dilemma) and at Oyoun Berlin (2022, poem-installation A GAZE THAT DON’T SEE ME), upon the completion of Becoming Alman residency. She is one of the founders of KUIR Poetry, a literary, performance, and communitarian project about queer poetry from an anti-colonial perspective, awarded with funds from Projektförderung Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain (2020 and 2021). Her writings are mainly in Portuguese/Brazilian and German. Besides her artistic endeavors, Jô also works as a German teacher for migrants in Berlin. She is finishing her BA in literature at Humboldt University in Berlin.