MY RESEARCH.
My research centers on the unwritten histories of Black moving image arts, drawing from Africanist Aesthetics across dance, photography, and film. I work with found footage of Black performers, not to recreate their images but to kinesthetically empathize with them, allowing their presence to guide my movement, pacing, and composition. Narrative structure and experimental editing are intuitive tools I use to embody values rooted in Africanist Aesthetics, including ephebism, polyrhythm, polycentrism, epic memory, and repetition.
Due to the historical neglect in preserving Black films, early dance images are often lost or undocumented—leaving gaps in the screendance timeline and limiting access to embodied knowledge. These absences fuel my interdisciplinary approach to archival research. I work with these gaps by using found footage and embodied practices as a means of unearthing, imagining, and reclaiming what has been obscured.
My ongoing project, Reimagining Screendance: Reclamation of Black Aesthetics in Dance Film History, seeks to minimize the representation gap in screendance by challenging dominant aesthetic value systems and pedagogy. Like early Black filmmakers Spencer Williams and Oscar Micheaux, who reimagined Black representation on screen, I aim to create space for the performers and makers who have been erased from historical narratives.
This research is both scholarly and creative. It's a call to remember and to honor those whose artistic contributions continue to shape the future of dance and film.
Due to the historical neglect in preserving Black films, early dance images are often lost or undocumented—leaving gaps in the screendance timeline and limiting access to embodied knowledge. These absences fuel my interdisciplinary approach to archival research. I work with these gaps by using found footage and embodied practices as a means of unearthing, imagining, and reclaiming what has been obscured.
My ongoing project, Reimagining Screendance: Reclamation of Black Aesthetics in Dance Film History, seeks to minimize the representation gap in screendance by challenging dominant aesthetic value systems and pedagogy. Like early Black filmmakers Spencer Williams and Oscar Micheaux, who reimagined Black representation on screen, I aim to create space for the performers and makers who have been erased from historical narratives.
This research is both scholarly and creative. It's a call to remember and to honor those whose artistic contributions continue to shape the future of dance and film.
“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it's to imagine what is possible.”
- bell hooks
PRESENTATIONS
2025 Cinematic Soundscapes, DCW Co-Creation Lab, Barnsdall Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2024 Embodied Archives: Explorations of Black Dance on Film, RITM Fellows’ Showcase, Yale University, New Haven, CT
2024 Unearthed: Unveiling the Black Gaze in Screendance History, Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, Duke University, Durham, NC
2024 Embodied Archives: Explorations of Black Dance on Film, RITM Fellows’ Showcase, Yale University, New Haven, CT
2024 Unearthed: Unveiling the Black Gaze in Screendance History, Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, Duke University, Durham, NC
