Hi, I’m Amanda (she/her)

I’m a dancer, choreographer, writer, educator, and administrator. Outside academia, I’ve done some work in repro justice and recovery coaching. I believe we’re here to heal.

And I believe we can move beyond looking at dancers and look to them for ways to be in and move through lived complexities of the here-and-now. So I’m working on a book about dance artists who adopt and adapt somatics to choreograph critical responses to sociopolitical difficulty. I’m calling their work socio-somatic dance.

My research for the book is practice-based and grounded in my experience as a dancer: I’ve been in the studio with the artists I write about, and I write about their work from an embodied perspective. This includes my practice and facilitation of Open Source Forms. (I’ve made an audio series of this creative and somatic practice available to stream through this website. You can check it out here, and learn more about my writing here.)

I’m honored and privileged to live in Albuquerque, NM and work at the University of New Mexico, which both sit on unceded Pueblo land.