Naomi Macalalad Bragin is a transdisciplinary movement artist and writer interested in forming collaborations oriented toward solidarity and collective healing.
With artist and community organizer Milvia Pacheco Salvatierra, she serves as co-artistic director of Seattle-based performance group Little Brown Language. Read about our current project Grief Rituals here.
Her first book Kinethic California: Dancing Funk & Disco Kinships (2024) tells stories of streetdances created by youth living in 1970s California whose everyday artistry helped set foundations for global contemporary hip hop dance. Kinethic California is winner of the 2025 Errol Hill Prize in African American performance studies and available as an open e-book at University of Michigan Press. Her dance writing has also been published in The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Tropics of Meta, the Oxford Handbooks of Hip Hop Dance and Screendance Studies, and Afrikadaa Magazine, and has won the Gerald Kahan Scholar Prize of American Society for Theatre Research and Outstanding Dance Publication of Congress on Research in Dance.
From 2002-2008 she directed DREAM, a nationally-touring streetdance company sponsored by Oakland's Destiny Arts Center. She was a NYC Hip Hop Theater Festival Future Aesthetics Artist and received support from Creative Work Fund, East Bay Community Foundation, Zellerbach Foundation, Rennie Harris PureMovement and People United for a Better Oakland. Full Circle, DREAM's collaboration with Cuban b-boy and folklorist José Francisco Barroso, explored cultural syncretisms in hip hop and Afro-Cuban rumba, nominated for the Isadora Duncan Dance Award. She danced in the streets as a member of Emma Said Dance Collective, doing de-escalation movement work during the WTO protests. Her artistic process is deeply informed by three-decades study of African Diaspora dances in the US, Cuba, Brazil and Europe, and underground dancing in clubs and parties of 1990s Los Angeles and New York.
Find her work as associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell here.