Sumayyah Smith is a multidisciplinary dance artist weaving together the intersections of caretaking, art making, and world building. Her movement composition is a free-flowing container for pleasure and radical imagination: shapeshifting between somatics, performance, and play as tools for personal and collective healing. Sumayyah’s process is a flirtatious interaction with nature, sexuality, humor, surrealism, and the deconstruction of the Black femme identity. As an emerging choreographer and artist in residence in New York City, Sumayyah’s work has been presented at CPR (Center for Performance Research), Index Space, Mark Morris Dance Center, The Brick Theatre, and LaMama. She has also been in collaboration and process as a performer with Jenna Westra, Miles Greenberg (at Faurschou Gallery), Jesse Obremski, Olga Rabetskaya, and others. Sumayyah is currently based in Berlin. 

Through her residency at soft power from 30.6.–27.7.2025, Sumayyah will be in the early research stages of her latest work entitled Spring 1972 .

The super soft residency is a format, in which soft power regularly welcomes artists, musicians or performers to take over our space for a period of time to pursue, rehearse, explore their current research, projects and ideas. For the summer iteration of the residency programme, an Open Call was published in April 2025, addressing artists and art collectives of all disciplines based in Berlin who are facing space constraints. Thank you to all the artists who applied for the residency – We received numerous impressive applications that not only reflect the artistic diversity and excellence but also the urgent need for workspaces that exists in this city.