CONTACT & BIO

My work happens at the intersection of writing and movement. I am a poet and dancer with a practice rooted in recitation, writing, choreographing and improvisation. I write, and I dance and I often work interdisciplinarily choreographing from the words of a poem and/or translating movement phrases into speech and text. My work explores how words are bodies too: with speed, and levels, and shape and size, (making images), and how language is communicated with the body. A turn and a turn of phrase mean the same thing but in different forms. The space of overlap where arranging lines in a stanza becomes like arranging steps of movement is where I anchor my approach, talking/writing/thinking about how I move as much as I connect my movement to how I’m thinking/talking/writing; exploring rhythms, patterns and qualities of speech through both the written word and a choreographic praxis.

Right now, my work explores the way cultural imagination (ideology) impacts how one learns to approach performance and the performer(s) and two, the way poetry (words and text) can be part of the design of a physical space.

And currently, I am a Poet in Residence with the Chicago Poetry Center and a lecturer at the University of Chicago in Theater and Performance Studies.