Donte Collins

Donte Collins (he/they; b. Chicago Heights, 1996) is a poet, playwright, and performance artist whose lyric life is a polychronic discipline that helps the daily living get done. His work moves between page, stage, and public space, treating performance as embodied study, placing Afro-now pressure on language in the civic work of Black aliveness. They follow the blues toward its brightness, trusting sweat, sequins, laughter, and longing as serious sources of knowledge. His practice carries Butch-queen poetics and care traditions of the Black diaspora. They live and work in the Twin Cities and are a core member of the transdisciplinary performance collective side by side by side by, where collaboration becomes an expanded sensorium and the spirit plays through movement, sound, and installation.