I am an activist, artist, scholar, and teacher who mediates knowledge through my body. My research in disability studies questions dance’s ableism and can offer injured dancers and those interested in dance movement therapy ways to think critically about disability identity and culture. My work explores representation, aesthetics, and history and theorizes disability as a cultural identity. I use disability rhetoric to study the relationship between ableism, racism, classism, and sexism.
Much of my research and professional dance experience has been focused on integrating disability studies into the dance field. By bringing Critical Intersectional Disability Studies to Dance I hope to help students understand how disability, illness, injury, and aging are things that can be prepared for as well as expose them to the wealth of academic and popular texts that theorize these embodiments. I remind students that disability has always been part of dance, but it has usually caused an exit from the field. I hope to provide training for ways to continue to be in dance through injury, illness, aging, and disability. In 2019 I presented at the Emerging Pathways within Somatic Movement & Dance Education conference on "Paradigm Shift: Disability Studies and Somatic Practice" offering ideas of cure, health, and ableism to dance educators from across the nation.
I have performed with David Gordon's Pick up Company and Nicholas Leichter Dance. In 2019 I was honored to be selected as one of ten choreographers invited to UCLA for the Inaugural Dancing Disability Cohort, with investigations of dance and disability lead by Alice Sheppard, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Victoria Marks. I received degrees in both Dance and History from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and an MFA in Dance from the University of Colorado Boulder. I am currently pursuing an Somatic Movement Educator certification through Body Mind Centering Association.
Currently, I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at Ursinus College, outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where I teach somatics, introduction to dance, modern, and dance composition.