For All Your Life is a performance, film, and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and death, drawing on the life insurance industry for method and metaphor. In the film, Brooklyn choreographer and performer Leslie Cuyjet delivers a seminar that reveals how the insurance business is linked to the historical slave trade, how people grapple with the inevitability of death, and how monetary value is affixed to human life. In performance, Cuyjet embodies the passions and conflicts underlying such transactions.
Deemed “a potent choreographic force” by The New York Times, Cuyjet is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and received a 2019 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award. Her solo Blur earned a 2022 award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator, and With Marion (2023) reflected on the legacy of her great-aunt, Marion Cuyjet, a pioneer in Black dance education. Learning that major insurers once sold policies on enslaved people became the seed for For All Your Life, complicating Cuyjet’s own understanding of value, mortality, and legacy. Extending beyond the stage, the project includes a companion website (forallyourlife.com), a digital marketplace that invites audiences to confront how Black life and death have been—and continue to be—quantified.
