Biography
I make projects that address the body as an archive for personal and social memory. My choreography has toured nationally and internationally and I have received residencies from Yaddo and Djerassi, and funding from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, the Mellon Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, The Clorox Foundation, and Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME). Between 2001-2014 I made dance projects in California where I have been presented at ODC, REDCAT, and Highways Performance Space. From 2014-18 I served as an Assistant Professor of Dance at Ball State University where I created community based dance and social practice projects in Indianapolis, IN. In 2018 I relocated to Hartford, CT where I focus on dance and community as an Assistant Professor of Dance at Trinity College. I am a 2021 CT Office of the Arts Fellow and a Guest Artist in the Masters in Social Practice Art at University of Indianapolis.
Artist Statement
I am a choreographer who uses modern and postmodern dance as tools to understand the corporeal impact of history. I have an abiding interest in the past, and an engagement with our bodies as archives for personal and social memories. In dances this may manifest as historical reenactment, narrative rupture, listmaking, or scripted collage. My choreographic projects are interdisciplinary and I often work in collaboration with filmmakers, visual artists, poets, and scientists.
I am committed to the exacting, physical labor of movement discovery and each piece has a distinct vocabulary drawn from its animating questions. Specificity of gesture is a powerful engine behind the projects that I make and I believe even the smallest energetic shift can change an experience completely. My projects range from highly designed stage compositions to participatory containers that invite indeterminacy and messiness. Recently I have focused on creating public events and encounters that explore community through movement.
Creating choreography is like hiking in the dark – I have faith that we will get there but along the way there might be stumbles, long detours and even forays into beautiful spots that will be evident only in their psychic trace. What excites me about dance is its ability to hold all these diversions in tension. My dances are characterized by their contradictions - I am dedicated to performances that are as messy and surprising and beautiful and complicated as the people who created them and the world in which they live.