I am a dancer, writer, wanderer, wonderer—collaborating with other artists to heal and recreate worlds.
Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics, my current writing project, tells stories of streetdances created by youth living in California during the 1970s Funk & Disco eras, whose everyday artistry helped set foundations for global contemporary hip hop dance. The book is forthcoming with the international Dance Studies Association's Studies in Dance series (University of Michigan Press) and is funded by the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, Simpson Center for Humanities, UW Royalty Research Fund and National Endowment of the Humanities. My research is published in The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Tropics of Meta and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance. My writing has won The Drama Review's Student Essay award, Gerald Kahan Scholar Prize of American Society for Theatre Research, and Outstanding Dance Publication of Congress on Research in Dance.
Little Brown Language is a new project I'm growing collaboratively with Milvia Pacheco Salvatierra, dancer, painter, poet and Executive Director of Movimiento Afrolatino Seattle (MÁS). We research submerged histories of resistance to colonial encounter in Venezuela and the Philippines, reinterpreted as dance-incantations. Little Brown Language showcased in 2019 at On the Boards North West New Works Festival and is supported by a UW Bothell Creative Practice Seed Grant and Seattle/King County's 4Culture. In Seattle, I facilitate a creative process group for PNW performance artists called con'spirar: a folxart salon.
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 won support of Creative Work Fund, East Bay Community Foundation, Zellerbach Foundation, Rennie Harris PureMovement and People United for a Better Oakland. Full Circle, our collaboration with b-boy and folklorist José Francisco Barroso, explored cultural syncretisms in hip hop and Afro-Cuban rumba, nominated for the Isadora Duncan Dance Award. My work 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, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Find my work as an educator at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts, University of Washington Bothell here.