B.A. Dance, Wesleyan University
M.A. Folklore/Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Ph.D. Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

• BIS 134 Introduction to Dance
• BISIA 219 Interdisciplinary Arts
• BISIA 330 Street and Club Dance Workshop
• BIS 322 Culture and Performance

In my classes, performing happens both on conventional stages and in everyday life, where potentially any event can be studied as a performance. I ask students to see themselves in the role of artist. Practices call deep attention to and the potential transformation of socially trained patterns of knowing and relating. I bring my community activist work into the classroom, facilitating group meditations and discussions about love, vulnerability, accountability and boundary setting, drawing on works by feminist and queer thinkers. Although I do present a basic itinerary for each of my classes, students’ curiosity will often alter the map.

I teach all study as practices of seeing differently. To build more expansive ways to see, I use a method I call Noticing that connects somatics practices to Black Feminist pedagogies, especially in the work of Jacqui Alexander and Audre Lorde. Noticing is a way of full-body listening, accessing a range of resources from physical feelings to emotional responses, as part of engaging an intellectual process. Noticing allows meaning to be partially hidden, multiple and open-ended. Noticing brings vulnerability into critical research, which I consider integral to self-care and access-centered learning.

My creative research moves across mediums of dance, music, and writing. I am most at home collaborating with other artists who use their art forms as a world building practice.

At UWB, I teach courses that span dance, cultural politics, collective healing, and performance as research. I perform and create interdisciplinary work with Seattle-based artist and community organizer Milvia Pacheco Salvatierra, as Little Brown Language. We explore the intersection of ritual and performance, drawing on submerged histories of cultural transformation in Venezuela and the Philippines, translated as dance-incantations. We have performed for On The Boards, Wing Luke Museum, Base Experimental Arts, and Friends of the Waterfront. While living in Oakland, California, I founded and toured DREAM, an award winning streetdance performance company. Our piece Full Circle, a collaboration with hip hop dancer and AfroCuban folklorist José Francisco Barroso, was nominated for the Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Award in Choreography. I have been a New York City Hip Hop Theater Festival Future Aesthetics Artist and received funding from Creative Work Fund, Rennie Harris PureMovement, East Bay Community Foundation and Zellerbach Foundation. 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.

My book Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Kinships mixes dance ethnography and oral history to tell stories of streetdances created by youth living in 1970s California whose everyday artistry helped set foundations for global contemporary hip hop dance. The book is winner of the 2025 Errol Hill Prize in African American performance studies and is published with the Dance Studies Association’s Studies in Dance Series (University of Michigan Press). I have received support for my research from National Endowment of Humanities, Simpson Center for Humanities, Royalty Research Fund, and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. Read an interview about the book.