LAB ARTIST 2023

ELEVATE CHICAGO DANCE 2022

Enneréssa is a multi-hyphenated artist and CEO/Founder of Praize Productions, Inc. As an accomplished writer and choreographer, she has produced eight award-winning, theatrical productions and most recently directed her first motion picture. She has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in education from Indiana University. She is a community activist whose work is committed to amplifying the voices of the Black community. Enneréssa received a CMS Merit Award, an America’s Big Sisters Award, and was named to the Young Women’s Professional League’s “40 Under 40” for her work in the arts. Enneréssa was chosen by Ingenuity to sit on its Public Affairs Collective Impact Panel to improve arts education for Chicago’s youth. In 2021, she was selected to co-chair the Economic Development Pillar for the citywide initiative, WeWill Chicago.

For her Lab year project, Enneréssa plans to create a dance work that tells a story of Blackness and womanhood and the ability to navigate and thrive in a society that does not protect those two things and wishes to dilute its “potency” and necessity. She will develop a book of poetry by gathering her writings and discovering how to convey written narrative through movement in a way that reaches the audiences’ multiple senses. The movement will convey a coming of age for Black women with “difficult” names. The movement will be set to jazz, Gospel, blues, and house music; fundamental genres that are both rooted in Black and Chicago culture.