Movement biography.
With rhythm & plants as teachers, I identify as a dancer with 16 years of training in post-modern contemporary, Silvestre technique (Brazil), African contemporary, Afro-Brazilian, West African and American modern dance. Fueled by facing an unstable environment, I earned a Summa Cum Laude Bachelor's degree in Sustainable Ecosystems and Soil Science with undergraduate studies in Dance Media & Choreography at Arizona State University and Dance Performance at University of Waikato in New Zealand. Since graduation, I occasionally lead classes in Urban Contemporary, or an interpretation of my own style with live music, and free-form or contact dance jams paired with plant medicines as a social tool for camaraderie. Professionally, I have performed with international companies and projects based in coastal Salvador, Brazil and Lisbon, Portugal while training in their contemporary & fusion movement specialties. In my home-city of Phoenix, Arizona I continuously sought out invigorating ways to create & train as an artist while regularly performing for live musical artists at various activism-centric festivals and venues. As a full-time certified herbalist, I subtly encourage the holistic approach of movement as a way to heal through psycho-nueroimmunology and pelvic liberation.
As of August 2019, I was a candidate for an MFA in Performance and Choreography at University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. My drive to bee there was to create content-driven choreography to cultivate awareness for the nearly equatorial islands and oceanic cultures suffering from the collective disease of industrial pollution [the most] through connecting arts to carbon sequestration. I left UH Mānoa in 2021 to seek out independent projects and now work for Dancers Unlimited, a non-profit Dance Company based out of Honolulu and New York City.
In the future, look forward to forming an ocean-oriented contemporary dance company & project in Honolulu, called bluePrint Movement.
A current exploratory project I am playing with is how plants can be our teachers of intuitive movement. I call this series, Botanarchy. Botanical anarchy: Decolonizing the Euro-centric methodologies and techniques to look to beings close to earth for guidance on new kinesthetic pathways and somatic approaches .
