Sol Cabrini is a performance artist, musician, poet, filmmaker, rapper, and scholar whose work moves fugitively across mediums, genres, and names. Raised in Chicago within a Louisiana–Mississippi–Tennessee lineage, Cabrini situates her practice at the faultlines of creolization, black social life, and trans poetics. She is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University, completing a dissertation titled At the Limits of Creolization: Black Social Life, (c)reolité, and the Poetics of Unbeing, which theorizes “(c)reolité” as the spectral afterlife of creole formations once absorbed into circuits of racial capitalism and art colonialism.

Cabrini is the author of Tgirl.jpg (Roof Books, 2022). Her poetry has appeared in The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Chicago Reader, Wonderpress, and more. She is also at work on Poetics of Unbeing, a lyric-theoretical manuscript that braids grief, refusal, and archival disruption; Spectral Frames: Blackness, Performance, and the Art of Seeing Otherwise, a collection of experimental arts criticism engaging figures such as Archibald Motley, Elizabeth Catlett, and Edward Hopper; and Nocturne for the Non-Subjects, a hybrid prose manuscript that moves between memoir, political poetics, and experimental autofiction to examine black trans life, surveillance, intimacy, refusal, and world-making.

Her performances, compositions, and films have been staged and screened internationally, refusing the border between scholarship and art. Whether sound-designing a melancholic score for theater, theorizing diasporic aesthetics through Beyoncé’s Formation, or writing experimental poetics that break with grammar and archive, Cabrini insists on performance as both an architecture of survival and a refusal of erasure.

She is a recipient of the Trans Studies at the Commons Fellowship (Mellon Foundation, University of Kansas) and has held fellowships at the Center for the Study of American Exile & Expatriation, among others. Her research has been supported by NYU’s Performance Studies program and presented at international conferences, including on ecologies of architecture and dance.

Across poetry, prose, performance, and theory, Cabrini builds a vocabulary for unbeing, where survival trembles within the very grammars that consume it.