Greg Osei is a visionary singer, songwriter, producer, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist who explores the healing power of culture, community, and creativity. As a Massachusetts-born child of Ghanaian immigrants that spent several years living in Latin America and is currently based in Harlem, Greg has always found himself at the intersection of seemingly different ideas and experiences, and he seeks to uncover the beauty that lies at that intersection.
For that reason, he works across genres and disciplines—Afrocosmopolitan music, performance, participatory art, film, dance, visuals, theater, ritual—to craft unique worlds that help uncover transformative possibilities. His award-winning dance-music film “Searching for Wonder” invites viewers into such a world as it highlights how black folk can connect to their ancestral pasts and their transformative futures. As the film’s director and lead performer, he was invited to showcase the project at numerous film festivals worldwide including the New Orleans Film Festival, the Indie Memphis Film Festival, the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, and the Mexico City Videodance Festival. During his years performing in Latin America, his encounters with immersive, interactive art and his work in communal street theater invigorated his passion for participatory art. He was further convinced of the power of thta medium at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, where he performed in interactive pieces by a number of artists including Yoko Ono, Lygia Clark, and Anne Imhof. With fellow artist Tina Colón, he also performed a concept show, Latin Soul [redefined], which searched for new intersections between Latin and soul music traditions. His collaborations with former Martha Graham dancer Abdiel–A Walk in My Heels, which explores gender fluidity; and The Color Iz, commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots–disrupted rigid categories and binary frameworks, challenging the boundaries between leader/follower, male/female, queer/straight, spectator/performer, and the fixity of genres, disciplines, and temporalities.
In the face of the uncertainty of the 2020 pandemic, Greg was inspired to write and produce music that encouraged dance and movement, celebrated love and connection, and engendered community. The result was love alive, a concept album about choosing love in spite of immense fear. Rooted in r&b/soul, the project reflects Greg’s expansive musical influences as it seamlessly integrates elements of dancehall, afropop, house, synth funk, dance pop, and gospel. The album’s cinematic soundscapes draw audiences into lush, new worlds of possibility. Drawing on his personal experiences and his broader reflections, love alive captures Greg at his most authentically expressed, sharing varying facets of his identity, from passionate sensuality and raucous playfulness to radical vulnerability and justice-oriented convictions. Greg’s artistry is an invitation to revel in our own exquisite complexity and access the worldshaping power of our own creativity.
“All the things that have traditionally been pitted against each other, in either/or binaries, I don’t see as separate because I have seen all of those things come together in me, so I know it’s possible for them to be in constructive conversation with each other. I seek to bring people and experiences together. Not by erasing the uniqueness of those people and those experiences, but by playing with the space around them, merging them, placing them side by side, or just laying them bare for us all to see.”