Stuff I did BioI began as a ballet and Horton dancer 14 years ago at Hyde Park School of Dance where I discovered my passion for choreography. I continued to pursue dance making at Sarah Lawrence College, where I expanded my scope to include a wider range of dance techniques as well as production, theatrics, video, and theory. By the end of my time at school, I’d become an interdisciplinary artist fascinated by addressing topics of technology and experiences of being through collaborative performance.
As a performer I worked extensively with Sara Rudner and Rou Rou Ye. At the same time, I was showing original dance pieces around New York including at Arts on Site, Triskelion Arts, Movement Research, and in Chicago at the Logan Center for the Arts. In 2019 I was selected for the Next Steps residency at The Chen Dance Center, where I created Grim Boy as an exploration in white online toxic masculinity. With the change of times, I returned to my tangential art love, video. This has generated my newer works I only move in circles now and Space Occupy which were shown in Proteo Media’s 2020 and 2021 Post/Futures Festival respectively. Both works continued my examination of the effects of digitalization on our senses of self-narrative. Beyond my own work, I’m also a collaborating editor on a full-length dance film examining black women’s strength and martyrdom created by Tanniqua-Kay Buchanan of Négritude and Dance Loop. An excerpt of this film entitled Farewell Sonata was recently featured as part of South Chicago Dance for the camera Virtual Festival in 2021 and the full work is anticipated 2022. |
Artistic PerspectiveI used to be uber dancey-dance, but then I transformed into an interdisciplinary artist focused on the methodology of making.
For each work, my methods change. But consistently gesture is used as the poetic to identify myriad other, more specific things. Because community, confusion, and conversation are deeply revealing, I’m drawn to collaboration. Video engaged me in a new kind of conversation with the gestures I was drawn too, allowing me to expand on material with a newfound level of nuance. I construct videos centered on performance, and I construct performances tied to videos. Both gain identities in the editing process, where I try to create an experience rooted impressionistic overwhelm. The Movement Image drives this. After all, Movement Image departs from the focus of informational content and instead looks at the gesture of the informational context. These gestures are a result “of not being able to figure something out in language” and expose new depths to the phenomena that capture my imagination. |