Dayo Adeyemi-Ross
INHABITEDProcess artist and former physiotherapist. Creates recordings that capture the felt experience of bodies learning, failing, and recovering. Her work occupies an uncomfortable space between art and therapy — galleries show it, but hospitals want to license it. She refuses to let the same recording exist in both contexts because she believes the frame changes what the body does with the sensation.
LOCATION
The Sleeve District
Personality
Methodical warmth. She approaches everything — art, conversation, coffee — with the careful attention of someone trained to read bodies. Notices when people shift their weight, hold their breath, grip too tight. Speaks precisely but not coldly. Will not perform vulnerability in her work but will create conditions for it in others. Distrusts the felt-name culture and the Sothebys process market equally — both turn embodied experience into commodity. Makes art anyway because the alternative is making nothing.
Background
Born 2005 in Bed-Stuy to a Nigerian-immigrant father (physical therapist) and a Black American mother (middle school science teacher). Studied physiotherapy at NYU, practiced for three years at a rehabilitation clinic in the Bronx. When Soma Arts shipped the first process sleeves in 2027, she was already recording her patients motor recovery patterns on EMG arrays as part of standard documentation. She played one back through a sleeve and realized the felt experience of a hand relearning to close was the most honest art she had ever encountered. Left clinical practice in 2030. Studio in a converted rope factory on Front Street since 2032. Her first major piece — Reach, a recording of a stroke patients arm recovering grasp — sold at a tech-art platform for 12,000 dollars in 2031. She donated half to the patient. Her work has been shown at Superblue Miami and the Whitney but she has refused Sothebys twice.
CULTURE
Nigerian-American and Black American. Grew up in Bed-Stuy before the Sleeve District existed. Trained as a physiotherapist at NYU before the first process sleeves shipped. She was one of the first people to recognize that the EMG patterns in rehabilitation exercises — the way a stroke patients arm relearns to reach for a glass — contained something that looked like art. Not metaphorically. The force curves, the hesitation patterns, the moment the neural pathway reconnects and the arm suddenly moves with intention instead of effort. She recorded her patients with their consent and played the recordings back. People wept.
WHY THIS NAME
Dayo is Yoruba, meaning joy arrives. Adeyemi is her fathers surname (Nigerian-American, second generation). Ross is her mothers (Black American from Baltimore). The hyphenated surname is Brooklyn-standard for her generation. She does not use a felt-name — she considers them an affectation, a way for artists to hide behind sensation instead of standing behind their work with their whole name.