Germaine Ingram

Germaine Ingram has dedicated a half-century to work in law, public service, performing arts, and arts/cultural strategy and production. In addition to 30 years in legal practice and law teaching, her career in arts and culture, spanning more than 25 years, includes dance and vocal performance, choreography, stage production, oral history, writing, filmmaking, and arts/culture strategy at the intersection of art and social change. She creates evening-length, multi-disciplinary works that explore themes related to history, collective memory, and social justice; and designs, directs, and executes, for herself and other artists, arts/culture projects that illuminate community arts/cultural histories. Recent projects include a 2+ year exploration of the history and evolution of Yoruba-rooted performative and spiritual practices in Philadelphia since the mid-20th Century, and a creative/performance homage to the collective genius among jazz innovators in North Philadelphia in the 1950s-70s. She is currently researching the life and legacy of Louise Madison (1911-1971), a Black woman tap dancer of extraordinary artistic prowess who was denied the recognition she was owed. Germaine’s work has been supported by the NEA, The Pew Center for Arts & Humanities, the Independence, Leeway, Lomax Family, and Wyncote Foundations, and the Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts and the Humanities. Among other awards, she was a 2010 Pew Fellow in the Arts, Leeway Foundation Transformation awardee, and a 2014 resident fellow at the Sacatar Institute in Itaparica, Bahia, Brazil.  

She currently serves on the boards of the Leeway Foundation and Ars Nova Workshop; is a member of the Public Art Committee of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority’s 1% for Art program; and serves on the Brandeis University International Advisory Board for the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life.  She is a member of the Leadership Circle for IMPACT ((Imagining Together Platforms for Arts, Culture and Conflict Transformation), a Brandeis University-based global initiative to support the field and ecology of arts, culture and conflict transformation. 

Photo by J.J. Tizio

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