Artist in Residence for Dialogue-Building, Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives

Artist in Residence for Dialogue-Building,

Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives

Diversity and arts-based advocacy and program-building

As the first Artist in Residence for Dialogue-Building, Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives and King-Chávez-Parks Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (U-M) in 2016-18, I designed and implemented arts-based initiatives that ask what the body can bring to larger discussions of diversity, empowerment, and inclusion. After a period of contextual analysis, consultation and discussion with stakeholders across diverse communities on campus, I tailored this work to particular diversity-based challenges on U-M’s campus. Based in on-the-ground research I had begun years earlier with anti-Apartheid activists in South Africa, as well as democracy and economic justice activists and artists in Spain, I integrated this research with study of the Modern Civil Rights Movement in the US, the Black Lives Matter movement, and recent campus activism at U-M as well as throughout South Africa. At U-M, I then developed and spearheaded a coalition of 13 departments to support the experiential, body-based work of this artist residency across their Ann Arbor campus. Drawing upon my ongoing research on the connections and discrepancies between Contact Improvisation and democratic activism in South Africa, Spain and the US, the residency brought together diverse intergenerational and cross-disciplinary participants during a politically challenging time to build cross-campus relationships, meaningful dialogue, and collaborative research on larger questions of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Press:

RC Visiting Artist and Student Present at

Convening of Campus DEI Leaders

I was honored for my original, arts-based contributions to diversity at U-M by the President and Provost’s Office, and I gave an address to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) leaders highlighting the role of the arts in building substantive reflection and multi-layered discussion on complex socio-political questions. I also collaborated with social justice educator Kevin Goodman on Intergroup Relations (IGR) applications of this body-based diversity research, and spoke on an alumni panel at Yale at the height of the 2018 “sleeping while Black” crisis. In conjunction with Personal, Present and Immediate: Making Performance on Socio-Political Questions (a previous iteration of the Yale course mentioned in my cover letter), the U-M residency I built also included a public film series I curated and facilitated; professional development trainings; interdisciplinary workshops and a working group. It also culminated in Root Vegetables, an interdisciplinary diversity and resilience initiative I developed in the Dance Department on groundedness, growth and expanding definitions of beauty. The project came out of reflection on larger questions of institutional and departmental culture, and ways of productively shifting micro-environments toward being more inclusive and welcoming for people from diverse backgrounds. The performance, made in collaboration with first year dancers at U-M and first grade sculptors at a local elementary school, toured throughout Detroit and Ann Arbor, MI, and garnered several awards.

While these programs were custom built in response to diversity and inclusion-related challenges and particularities of micro-environments on U-M’s campus at that time, I would be delighted to discuss potential adaptations or creation of similar programs for your college or organization. Be in touch here.