I am a multidisciplinary movement artist, forming collaborations oriented toward solidarity and collective healing.
My 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. Available as an open e-book at University of Michigan Press and part of the international Dance Studies Association's annual series, the book was supported by the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Washington Simpson Center for Humanities, UW Royalty Research Fund and National Endowment of Humanities. My writing on dance has been published in The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Tropics of Meta and Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance, and has won the Gerald Kahan Scholar Prize of American Society for Theatre Research and Outstanding Dance Publication of Congress on Research in Dance.
Little Brown Language is my performance based collaboration with artist Milvia Pacheco Salvatierra. Exploring ritual as a portal for activating ancestral connection, we retell submerged histories of resistance to colonial encounter, translated as dance-incantations. We have performed in theater, gallery and outdoor spaces for On the Boards North West New Works Festival, Wing Luke Museum, Artists at the Center, and Reflections Dance Festival, and have received support from Seattle's 4Culture and Base Experimental Arts + Space residency. We form collaborations with local artists, including Angel Alviar-Langley, Ben Hunter, Jen Soriano, Nia-Amina Minor, Aviona Rodriguez, Akoiya Harris and jas moultrie. Our current project is an activation for Derek Dizon's a resting place, a grief and loss cultural resource center in Seattle's Chinatown International District, planned for spring 2025.
From 2002-2008 I directed DREAM, a nationally-touring streetdance company sponsored by Oakland's Destiny Arts Center. I 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. I danced in the streets as a member of Emma Said Dance Collective, doing de-escalation movement work during the WTO protests. My 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 my work as an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell here.