Below, the Love: An experiential poetic odyssey
Below, the Love is an experiential poetic odyssey that explores how love survives within the Black body. Written, directed, and performed by spoken word artists Vee & Dee, Below, the Love blends original poetry, sound, and visual media to examine what lies beneath love and all that we endure in pursuit of love as a practice. One impacted by culture, media, history, trauma, and ultimately—hope. Two voices stand on stage together, not to debate love but to bear witness to it, in awe, frustration and wonder through this intimate collaborative reflection.
Everything is below, the love.
About the Artists
DeShawn White is a Newark, NJ-based actor, director, producer, and performing artist whose work spans film, television, theater, and live performance. She has appeared in HBO’s The Deuce, Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga, NBC’s Law & Order: SVU, and the feature film Motherless Brooklyn.
Her lead performance in the film Blood Conscious earned recognition from the New York Times. On stage, she originated a role Off-Broadway at New Federal Theatre and earned two Audelco Award nominations. As an independent producer, DeShawn has produced two sold-out live shows — Confessions of a Dream Deferred and Mistakes Were Made, I Still Look Good Tho , executed without producing partners and driven entirely by her own marketing expertise.
A storyteller committed to fostering creative community, she brings a public relations background, a producer’s instinct, and a director’s eye to every project she touches.
VEE. is a Nigerian American multidisciplinary artist and storyteller based in NYC. With roots in theater, his work spans collage, photography, filmmaking, and hand-altered garments, exploring the tension between visibility and interiority, style and substance. Drawing inspiration from nature, hip-hop, cinema and surrealist animation; his practice centers transformation: of materials, of self, and of perception.
VEE. also works as a teaching artist with the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), facilitating creative writing residencies for high school students. An award-winning poet, he’s been a featured performer at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the NYC Poetry Festival. And his short films have screened at the NYC Chain Film Festival and Fresh Black Films Festival in Baltimore. In 2023 he debuted port(als) of entry, a multimedia project traversing storytelling as a form of collective healing, in collaboration with the Restorative Justice Initiative.
Whether designing wearable art or crafting immersive visuals, VEE. creates textured, story-driven works that invite curiosity, reflection, and a reimagining of the ordinary.
