Nathaniel Donnett (b. Houston, TX) is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner whose practice shapes and holds metaphysical and phenomenological significance. Donnett's practice is rooted in Black aesthetic expression, everyday aesthetic theory, and the lived experience. Using various media, such as sourced and reclaimed objects, plastic trash bags, clothing, duct tape, and musical instruments, Donnett challenges conventional timeline narratives and disrupts linear frameworks. His diverse practice, which includes 2-D mixed media textiles, sculpture, installation, sound works, and video, explores the poetics of human complexity, contradiction, and the notion of the in-between. Moreover, Donnett engages communities through exchanges, interventions, interviews, and discussions, fostering a participatory practice that forges social relationships between art and communities. By situating social-political and cultural concerns alongside broader themes such as imagination, dreams, the (in) exterior, and fiction, Donnett locates new spatial realities.

Donnett's use of encoded systems with geometrical and natural phrasing serves as polyrhythmic inquiries and modes of understanding. His use of idea, body, object, material, site, and community engagement are incomplete fragments. These fragmentations, however, are not mere moments of introspection and exploration of the unknown and uncertain. They are strategies that attempt to discover, uncover, or recover by seeking constellations of Black cosmologies located within vernacular representation, open forms of architecture, and the being of Black music and its process, enriching our understanding and appreciation of these complex systems.

Dark Imaginarence is a neologism Donnett coined to describe his practice and methodology. Rather than prioritize the object or consumption of the product as the focus, dark imaginarence emphasizes imagination, experience, place, observation, improvisation, spirituality, process, and community. Dark imaginarence is a polyrhythm and a ghost note. It is art, before art, after art, or may not be art at all. Dark imaginarence is neither- either/or - it's both/and. It is a body, mind, and soul composition played by human and spiritual ancestral genealogies. It is poetic, musical, material, doubt, ideas,  and cosmological. Dark imaginarence is blackness. Dark Imaginarence is a way of life where one lives creatively.

Nathaniel Donnett was born in Houston, Texas. Donnett received his B.A. in Fine Arts from Texas Southern University and his MFA from Yale University School of Art. Nathaniel is the recipient of the 2024 Houston Region Affiliated Fellowship at American Academy of Rome, a 2022 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Dean's Critical Practice Research Grant from Yale, and an Art and Social Justice Initiative Grant from Yale (2020). Donnett founded and published "What's the New News," a newspaper and project that reframed the narratives of historically African American neighborhoods. Other awards include a 2017 Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant, a 2015 Idea Fund/Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, and a 2014 Harpo Foundation Grant. His work has exhibited at The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; the Mennello Museum, Orlando, FL; the Ulrich Museum, Wichita, KS; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX, The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA, The American University Museum, Washington D.C., The University Museum, Houston, TX, The Kemper Contemporary Arts Museum, Kansas City, MO, The Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury CT, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX, and The New Museum, New York, NY.