I am a dance artist, teacher and a somatic practitioner born and raised in what is now known as Portland, OR. and I have lived most of my life in the shadow and glow of majestic Mt. Hood. I am shaped by this wild geography and my riot grrrlhood as much as I am shaped by my settler and immigrant ancestors. 

I am deeply curious and endlessly drawn to the wild things that grow between the cracks. It is no wonder I am entangled within a 30+ year dance practice. Through my body, I practice rigor and heartache and intimacy with this world that I wake up to. I have spent my adult life in service to dance, through performance, teachings, community gathering, on-going collaborations, and my somatic studies I support visibility and presence in our individual, cultural and social bodies. I invite ongoing states of mystery and unknowing to destabilize knowledge as this is the place when something else gets to exist. For me, dance making is a way to imagine and question and reside in the liminal space, where unraveling is not a marker of failure but one of great power and intrigue. Dance is where I touch upon the things that cannot be named and find new meanings for the things that are.

I actively use my intuition, improvisational forms, a kaleidoscope of different dance techniques I have studied along the way, my ongoing somatic practice, and entanglement to create work. I center long-term collaborative processes to destabilize hierarchies and tradition. I acknowledge that the body holds narratives and contains beautiful contradictions embodied; holding plurality. In my world, radical transformation is not only possible but desired. 

My choreographic work has been performed throughout the U.S at venues including On The Boards (Seattle), Fusebox Festival (Austin), The Lucky Penny (Atlanta), and PICA’s TBA Festival (Portland). I am a 2014-2015 NDP Touring Award recipient for Duet Love, which toured to Velocity Dance (Seattle), Pica’s TBA Festival, and DiverseWorks (Houston) and a recipient of a 2013 Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts supported my residency with Bucharest choreographer Madalina Dan in Romania. In 2017 I received the Barney Award commission through White Bird dance for my work Sensation/Disorientation and am Foundation for the Arts grant recipient (2018).

Internationally, I have performed my work in Bulgaria with support from American Dance Abroad, with residencies in France, Greece, Romania, and Portugal. I enjoy longstanding collaborations with artists and artistic centers in Atlanta, Seattle, and New Orleans among other places in North America. Included in this constellation of collaborations are multi-year projects with dance artists Elizabeth Ward (Vienna), Madalina Dan (Romania), Muffie Delgado Connelly (PDX), Shannon Stewart (Kansas) and Luke Wyland (composer).

Community-making is at the heart of all my endeavors. With FRONT, a dance newspaper (2012-2014), I, alongside Noelle Stiles, Danielle Ross, and Robert Tyree, worked with artists and scholars to propose new, current, future energies of dance theory and practices in the field. I am the founder (2014) and current Steward, of FLOCK Dance Center and instigated FLOCK’s Critical Engagement Series, a platform for regional and national artists to show work and converse. In 2015 I curated a series of dance residencies for Pacific NW artists within a framework of improvisation for ALL RISE, organized for a city block in Seattle, WA. For the past two decades, I have made it my ongoing project to create space and opportunity for other artists in my city and region. 

I live on the unceded land of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz,  Kathlamet,  Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many others who call this region home.

photo credit: Yaara Valey IG:@tenderheartphoto