Combining visual and literary arts with performance, Ali’s interdisciplinary practice emerges from the intersection of their Queer, Non-Binary identity and Muslim spiritual practice. Two oral traditions and somatic healing modalities provide a foundation for their theory and practice. First, as a semazan or ‘whirling dervish’ initiated in the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order, training under tradition-bearer Sakina Nur — and second, as a student of master artist Potri Ranka Manis who dances in unbroken lineage with the Indigenous nations of Mindanao, Southern Philippines.

Ali studied Art History at New York University, before earning their MA at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, where their genre-bending research on dance theorist Rudolph Laban won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) award for “Outstanding Master’s Thesis.”

Ali lives and works in Brooklyn, New York on the stolen and unceded land of the Lenapehoking.


ali.ali.purpura@gmail.com