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. Movement praxis is central to my understanding of the world, relationship to my identity, and career as an artist-scholar. The work I craft is inspired by women and queer people in my life and is rooted in women of color feminism theory; it wrestles with issues of gender, diaspora, and Latinidad. I seek to insert joy and desire into untold histories as a way of reclaiming agency for my femme and queer ancestors. 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.