I'm a Canadian-born, U.S.-based choreographer and dancer, teacher, thinker, and writer about movement, body, and survival.

I make dances, often with groups of people in university or community settings. My professional home and hub is Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, a small and tenacious organization that supports my dancemaking through long-term creative processes, mostly with the ensemble of dance artists affiliated with the company. We are a Chicago-based organization that prioritizes deep exploration of movement and inquiry into what human experience and response drives our movement choices, especially within the phenomenon of being seen. Organizationally, we prioritize paying artists over conventional markers of institutional growth.

I earned a PhD (2019) in Dance from Temple University (Philadelphia, PA), mentored by my dissertation advisor Dr. Karen E. Bond. I continued making dances during and informed by my doctoral research, which was head-spinning, complicated, and inspiring. Prompted by the PhD process, personal transformations born of the pandemic, deepened work with my Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak collaborators, and reckoning with academia and the complications of rape culture, my current intentions are to build on what I started as a young woman by continuing to create and present my work, offering regular and robust opportunities for students and teachers by formalizing Spiral Body Techniques™, and increasing focus on writing and speaking about the problematics of rape culture and somatophobia (fear of body) as these phenomena inform the way humans move, see one another, and consider power. Phew. That was a long sentence.

I’m fortunate to have been seen by my communities in stages of transformative and risky-feeling growth and change. My choreographic work has received positive critical acclaim and audience response, and been funded by grant awards and fellowships. I'm recognized as a "singular voice in Chicago dance," (TimeOut Chicago) who has been "distilling the essence of performance—the relationship between audience and artist—for years, exposing the honest beauty of the body in its natural state: fluid, organic motion" (New City Chicago). My current project is Ex/Body, a multi-year, multi-iterative choreographic project exploring the body’s response to trauma. The first work in the series premiered in Chicago in 2019, with subsequent dance films in 2021 and 2022. The next live iteration is the ensemble piece Ex/Body: strike, vibrate, shatter, which will premiere in Chicago in March 2023.

I find clarity and connection to myself and others through writing that blends autobiography with theory, embodied and critical. I was appropriately and deeply challenged by creating an archive for and then writing my dissertation focusing on, unpacking, and theorizing my transformative solo project My Name is a Blackbird. A piece of writing inspired by that project, the article “My Name is a Blackbird: release, transparency, agency,” was awarded the inaugural Linda Rolfe New Writers Prize by Research in Dance Education.