Who I Am, How I Move

I am a dance artist, educator, and researcher working through the corporeal body to question the logics of isolation, productivity, and perfectionism. My choreographic and pedagogical practices center improvisation and experimentation as ways of knowing—embodied methods that resist the pressures of constant output and instead invite collective presence and critical joy through the felt senses.

Over the last decade, I’ve performed and collaborated in a range of professional, community, and experimental contexts in Chicago and Denver. I’ve been honored to perform as a guest with Joel Hall Dancers, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance and Wonderbound, and to work as a collaborating artist with Control Group Productions, HOLDTIGHT company, Concept Dances, and others. I offer these experiences not as a résumé, but as a way of honoring the communities of artists who have shaped my understanding of dance as a relational and living practice.

Academically, I hold a BS in Kinesiology/Dance from Indiana University Bloomington and a thesis-defended MA in Social & Cultural Foundations in Education from DePaul University Chicago. DePaul is where “movement” became married to theory, in the most challenging and provocative ways. I am currently a PhD student at the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology, deepening this work. I am especially interested in phenomenology and ritual, thinking about how contemporary and ballet dancers question, evoke, and offer spaces imbued with generative tensions as they engage the rational individualism of the modern Western world. And all the same, generate fissures, crack, widen, and assemble hybrid existences of such abundance. Questions like How does the dancing body learn to misrecognize pain as normal, even aspirational? have sparked a new quest for a marriage between the religion of dance felt by many. The process What makes meaning? What moves me?… here is felt, is negotiated.

I see myself as part of a lineage of dancemakers who have used movement not just to entertain, but to question, remember, and reimagine. Whether in the studio, the classroom, or the theater, I aim to cultivate spaces where people feel seen, challenged, and moved. My hope is that through emotionally-attuned processes, we build work that sparks wonder—both in those who witness it and those who live it.