Artist Statement
I learned to dance merengue in the kitchen with my Dominican grandmother. I listened to her hips absorbing the rhythm and choreographic pattern without any need for verbal communication. These dances taught me about the intimacies of bodies, culture, and politics. As a mixed Dominican-Cuban-Jewish queer woman living in the US, memories like this are core to my identity. I create performances that draw on methodologies from dance, performance art, and theater. Rooted in women of color feminist theory, I make work that wrestles with issues of gender, diaspora, and Latinidad. Movement praxis and performance are central to my understanding of the world, relationship to my identity, and career as an artist-scholar. I see performance as a tool to reimagine forgotten and untold histories. Through scholarly and artistic research, I am intent on understanding how performance functions as a lens to understand socio-political issues, history, and intergenerational relationality.