Artist statement

Dance, storytelling, and poetry fill my spirit with exuberant joy.  They provide a space of therapy, and allow me to dig deeper within my spirit.   I aspire to inspire young women to heal their bodies by simply moving, and to put their troubles and pain on paper.  I remember the laughter that came from a participant in a dance workshop that I gave.  Whenever she shimmied her hips, her throat could not hold back the laughter that emerged from her belly.   Her actions expressed how I feel when I dance.

Dance first spoke to my spirit when I was seventeen years old.  At first, I classified my dance as “belly dancing”.  As I began to explore other types of dance, including African, Aztec, and flamenco, I began to realize, not only is dance healing, it is a deep spiritual connection to my ancestors.   I later stopped using recorded music in favor of acoustic sounds, to facilitate dialogues between dancers and musicians, without the use of words. I have engaged in a wide array of performances in a variety of settings with different instruments: banjo & tabla, a marching brass band-dancing in a parade, piano, vocalists, a violin, guitar, a trumpet, flutes, a berimbau and many different kinds of drums including djembes, dumbeks, drumming on the back of a guitar, a cajón, congas and a drum set.   I enjoy a wide variety of musical dialogs; each one is an entirely unique experience, but a truly joyful expression of spirit.

In addition to dance, I gradually developed a passion for other mediums of artistic expression including poetry, creative nonfiction storytelling, and telling stories through video production.  But most of all, I love live performance incorporating multiple mediums to tell a story.  My stylistic writing and use of video are all tools with the commonality of expressive storytelling. Most of my writing began with simply telling about my own experiences in my life with sexual harassment, and other perceived violations of my body.  But I slowly began to delve deeper and expand my writing to wider issues of social justice and history.  

Despite all of this joyful artistic expression, I did not consider myself an artist until I received the young artist program grant of $750 for the sole purpose of promoting myself as an artist.  Once I was forced into creating an artistic identity, I realized that I was an artistic being to the core.