Jennifer Ligaya is an artist-scholar and practitioner based in Chicago, specializing in ancestral folk and contemporary performance and dance, and ritual dramaturgy as ways of survival and liberation. Her work, influenced by Black and Filipinx communities, incorporates live rituals, experimental sound, and site-specific scores inspired by ancestral and futurist ways of knowing.

Ligaya is a full-time PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, researching Afro-Asian Womanist senso-realities and Indigenous healing practices. She teaches Performance, Culture & Communication with an emphasis on sensory justice and embodied inquiry.

Her projects include sound installations, visual art in emerging archives, and site-responsive rituals throughout the American South. She founded the SaltWater Road Performance Institute, dedicated to memory and ritual in Southern Black and Blasian spaces, and is a core member of Honey Pot Performance, focusing on Black feminist world-making.

Through her work, Ligaya fosters community engagement in shared listening and embodied dreaming, creating a space for liberation and sacred remembrance.

“I am composed of the dancers, thespians, menaces, and prophets. These are the stories I speak with the work I create.” — Jennifer Ligaya