My name is Sunni Lamin Barrow (b. 1998). I am a literary artist, performing curator, and critical practitioner from The Gambia, now living and creating in the Netherlands.
As Warsan Shire writes, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” I didn’t leave home by choice. I left because I had to. Because being queer in The Gambia made my body unsafe, and my existence unliveable. What followed wasn’t just exile, it was a rapture. A breaking open that continues to shape how I live, create, and imagine freedom. I carry this rapture into every word, every performance, and every silence I untangle.
My work moves between spoken word, theater, writing, curation, direction, and interdisciplinary dialogue. Deeply informed by psychology, I explore the interior worlds of trauma, memory, farewell, identity, and the emotional aftershocks of displacement. Most of my work lives within and around African queer migratory realities, but it also reaches beyond into universal questions of what it means to survive, to belong, and make a voice land.
I use poetry and performance as a compass, and I create spaces where grief, joy, love, queerness, blackness, global citizenship, and rituals can meet without apology. Whether on stage, on paper, or in curated installations, I search for a language that doesn’t just express, but remembers, very well.
My work has been staged at leading cultural institutions including the Van Gogh Museum, Huis Marseille, Kunsthal Museum, Oerol Festival, het National Theater and the Netherlands Theater Festival amongst many.
In 2023, I premiered A Fist of Tongues, a critically acclaimed spoken word theater piece confronting trauma and survival through a dialogue between my many selves. This production was nominated for the National BNG Bank Theater Prize and toured nationally across the Netherlands from 2023 to 2025.
I am currently pursuing a Master’s at DAS Theater, where my research centers on reconfiguring spoken word poetry within theater. This work aims to develop Spoken Word Theater as a distinct genre, inculcating the raw emotionality and political immediacy of spoken word poetry with the dramaturgical structures of contemporary sounds, opera, performance art, rituals and histrionics.
Through this hybrid form, I explore how spoken word can function as a healing architecture for diasporic memory. I am invested in crafting performance as site for radical vulnerability, where resistance, remembrance, and communal transformation can take root.
This research is deeply personal and profoundly collective. I create for those who carry grief and silence in their mouths. For those seeking new landings. For those still learning to arrive.
My name is Sunni Lamin Barrow (b. 1998). I am a literary artist, performing curator, and critical practitioner from The Gambia, now based in the Netherlands.
As Warsan Shire writes, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” I didn’t leave home by choice. I left because I had to. Because being queer in The Gambia made my body unsafe, and my existence unliveable. What followed wasn’t just exile, it was a rapture. A breaking open that continues to shape how I live, create, and imagine freedom. I carry this rapture into every word, every performance, and every silence I untangle.
My work moves between spoken word, theater, writing, curation, direction, and interdisciplinary dialogue. Deeply informed by psychology. I explore the interior worlds of trauma, memory, farewell, identity, and the emotional aftershocks of displacement. Much of my work lives within and around African queer migratory realities, but it also reaches beyond into universal questions of what it means to survive, to belong, and make a voice land.
I use poetry and performance as a compass, and I create spaces where grief, joy, love, loneliness, queerness, blackness, global citizenship, and rituals can meet without apology. Whether on stage, on paper, or in curated installations. I search for a language that doesn’t just express, but remembers, very well.
My works has been staged at leading cultural institutions including the Van Gogh Museum, Huis Marseille, Kunsthal Museum, Oerol Festival, het National Theater and the Netherlands Theater Festival amongst many.
In 2023, I premiered A Fist of Tongues, a critically acclaimed spoken word theater piece confronting trauma and survival through a dialogue between my many selves. This production was nominated for the National BNG Bank Theater Prize and toured nationally across the Netherlands from 2023 t0 2025.
I am currently pursuing a Master’s at DAS Theater, where my research centers on reconfiguring spoken word poetry within theater. This work aims to develop Spoken Word Theater as a distinct genre, inculcating the raw emotionality and political immediacy of spoken word poetry with the dramaturgical structures of contemporary sounds, opera, performance art, rituals and histrionics.
Through this hybrid form, I explore how spoken word can function as a healing architecture for diasporic memory. I am invested in crafting performance as site for radical vulnerability, where resistance, remembrance, and communal transformation can take root.
This research is deeply personal and profoundly collective. I create for those who carry grief and silence in their mouths. For those seeking new landings. For those still learning to arrive.