A web-based project and physical installation that uses the idea of the Black debutante ball to explore the African-American relationship to formality.

Keith and Mendi Obadike make music, poetry, and media art, and have been collaborating as internet artists since the 1990s. Their work has been exhibited, broadcast, and performed in the US and Europe. They have won awards from the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the Yale Cabaret, the Connecticut Critics Circle, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Cave Canem Poetry Workshop, Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize, the John Hope Franklin Award for Documentary, and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, among others. Recent projects include Four Electric Ghosts, an Internet opera for Toni Morrison’s Atelier at Princeton, and Ya Heard, a sound art exhibition they are curating for Rhizome.org.

Yale University, MFA in Sound Design (2004)
North Carolina Central University, BA in Art (2001)
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology
College of Art, Kumasi, Ghana, summer program (1998)