HOW WE Move 2025
Meet the dancers who were part of the 2025 cohort of How We Move, a dance intensive created for and by Disabled dancers and centering multiply marginalized (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, etc) dancers within our communities.
Meet the Artists
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Assaleh Bibi is a multi-disciplinary artist and healing practitioner. As a child of mountains and wild waters, they migrated through winds of border bullets to find refuge in exile on the sovereign lands of the Coast Salish Peoples.
Their practice is built upon, and ever-growing in, erotic relationship between land and water ecologies and her body. Zir work spans abundant mediums of mixed media, photography, ceramics, painting, sensory installations, poetry, sculpture, film, dance, and performance art to move through ancient futurisms with revolutionary medicine to transform our shit’cistems towards liberation.
Evolving from a 2016 collaboration, Conjuring Lezzat, Assaleh Bibi continues to deepen their praxis of weaving healing ritual and artistic work-a philosophy of art as medicine and medicine as art.
Currently Assaleh Bibi is exploring embodied ancestral poetry as moving and still metaphors through non-binary drag dance theater performances. Xe indulges in the anonymity within drag characters—via make-up and wardrobe transformation—to evoke the celebration and empowerment offered by freedom of expression. This liberatory work also attracts trans hatred and oppressive forces that want to control bodies and penalize such satiating freedom.
This juxtaposition of oppression and liberation, medicine and poison is a theme throughout hir work, art that disrupts rigid concepts of gender, birth, peace, war, genocide, life, death, past, and future, while simultaneously supporting expansive social and environmental justice rooted in mother earth tapestry.
Xir recent collaborations include a multi-year disability arts dance film embodying shapeshifting nonhuman mythical beings and a multi-year dance residency through their dedicated membership in a local Indigenous-led BIPOC performance collective.
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kumari giles is a multidisciplinary artist, connector, administrator and consultant interested in connection, transformation and social change.
As a queer, non binary, mixed maker of many things their work spans across performance, production, food, somatics, writing/poetry, mycology, community arts, mixed media, textiles, and dramaturgy.
They are interested in creating and shaping processes that center interdependence, access and joy. Driven by radical hope and collective care, their work aims to build embodied archives of what it feels like to be free, collectively wayfind and radically imagine new worlds together. They are committed to eradicating colonial systems of oppression by nurturing BIPOC, queer and trans, cross disability solidarity and healing.
kumari has been working in the arts professionally since 2011, locally, nationally and internationally. They work individually, in collectives and with organizations, notably ILL NANA/DiverseCity Dance Company (Right to Dance Programming, 2011-2020, Fire, 2016), Cyborg Circus Project (Safe Words* I didn’t say broccoli, 2021), Young People’s Theatre, the AMY Project, Possibilities Podcast, and the Lab for Artistic Intelligence.
In addition to nurturing a garden of creative and research-based work, they are currently building an artist-led network of disabled movers with the DisDance Collective and are a collective member of the Trans Healing Arts Web- visioning spaces that centre the healing & creativity of two spirit, trans and non binary people.
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Devin Hill is a graduate from the University of Central Oklahoma with a B.F.A. in Dance Performance. Their love of dance began at the age of three and has lasted a span of twenty years.
Devin set sights on dance as a career during their time at Collin College in Plano, Texas. While at Collin College, they were exposed to: Jazz, Ballet, Modern, Hip Hop, Tap, African, Improvisation, and Latin Ballroom.
Devin has had the opportunity of working with multiple artists such: as Christopher K. Morgan, William “Bill” Evans, Clarence Brooks, Hannah Baumgarden, Jeremy Duvall, Gregg Russell, Lachlan McCarthy, Kristin McQuaid, and Cat Cogliandro.
They were also a member of the 2015-2016 award winning Kaleidoscope Dance Company.
Since graduating from UCO, they have continued to further their knowledge of dance by performing, choreographing, teaching, and participating in intensives and workshops across the United States.
In 2018, Devin had the honor of performing with Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. They were also a cast member on the hit Facebook Watch series “Dance with Nia.
Mx. Hill currently resides in the Washington D.C. metro area, where they perform, educate, and advocate as a freelance dancer.
Devin also serves as a board member for Feel The Beat, an educational specialist for Bodywize Dance, and a dance development team member/instructor for Second Skin Society.
Mx. Hill strives to use their artistry to create a more safe, equitable, and accessible dance industry for everyone.
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As a multidisciplinary artist, Hector Machado represents the marginalized dance communities they belong to on stage, while educating and inspiring others. As a member of Pioneer Winter Collective, Machado has been leaving their mark on the Miami dance scene since 2018. A collaborating performer in evening length works: “Reprise (2018/2019) ,” “Birds of Paradise (2023/2024),” and “Ten Years From Now, Duets Reimagined.” Machado has also been a cohort member in the site specific choreography residency: “Grass Stains” (2020, 2022, 2024), and Cohort 3 of “Creative Connections” where they ran a research incubator for their Accessible Majorette Dance initiative, designed to develop a language and practice for bringing the majorette dance form to individuals with disabilities.
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Jackie Robinson is a wheelchair pole dancer based in Dallas, TX, specializing in sensual floor work flow and pole flow styles.
She and her identical twin sister were both born with cerebral palsy and underwent numerous procedures and therapies to learn how to walk.
In her mid-twenties, Jackie decided to reject the idea that disabled people couldn’t dance. She also wanted to connect with her sensual side and embrace her adult identity, so she started pole dancing. As time passed, Jackie’s symptoms progressed, and she gradually lost the ability to walk.
Instead of quitting, she decided to explore incorporating mobility aids into her dance style, which allowed her to feel freer, more comfortable, confident, and safe.
She also has a feeding tube that provides 100% of her nutrition since she can no longer eat or drink. She enjoys decorating and showcasing her medical devices because they give her the freedom to do the things she loves. Outside of dance, Jackie works as a software engineer specializing in Android apps and has a passion for fun fashion.
Jackie’s favorite moment in her dance journey was when her favorite singer, Demi Lovato, complimented her dancing to her fiance’s song!
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Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Zen Spencer is a multidisciplinary artist currently studying at Bennington College in Vermont, where she focuses on visual art and dance.
Her work explores the intersections of movement, identity, and disability, using performance and visual mediums to tell stories that center Black female disability.
Born with hemiplegic cerebral palsy, she has embraced her lived experience as an essential part of her creative voice.
Dancing since the age of three, Zen has cultivated a deep relationship with the body as both an expressive instrument and a site of complex meaning.
Her choreography incorporates improvisation, emotional depth, and embodied storytelling. She draws inspiration from artists such as Mickalene Thomas, Wangechi Mutu, and Jerron Herman, finding resonance in their approaches to representation, abstraction, and disability aesthetics.
Her work is expansive and evolving. She’s currently working on Breakthrough, a multimedia dance piece incorporating stop-motion animation and digital art, which builds on her earlier works, Maiden Voyage and Trapped. These creations reflect her growth as an artist, each layering new skills while centering themes of self-realization and liberation.
With kindness and openness as her guiding ethos, Zen seeks to foster community within her art practice.
She envisions creating work that challenges narratives about disability and expands possibilities for artistic expression, both onstage and in visual form.
Zen’s commitment to storytelling through movement and image positions her as an emerging artist with a unique, powerful voice.
How We Move is our opportunity as Disabled dancers to figure out what we want to create outside of a mainstream dance lens—while unpacking our own internalized ableism. What’s possible when we stop assimilating to a non-disabled dance world? What happens when we move from the margin to the center? Together, we’re about to find out.
India Harville, Executive Director of Embraced Body and Co-creator of How We Move
What is How We Move?
This six month hybrid program combines virtual gatherings with a 10-day in-person intensive in New York City, providing space and opportunity for multiply marginalized Disabled artists to move together, collaborate, and build cross-disability community.
How We Move will provide a rigorous access framework. Together, we’ll cultivate opportunities on our collective terms and build power towards a transformation of the colonial, eugenicist, and ableist lineages still present in our field.
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Dance Magazine
How We Move Offers a New Kind of Intensive Designed for Disabled and Multiply Marginalized Artists
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Crip News
How We Move is seeking applications for a six month hybrid program for multiply marginalized Disabled artists
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Broadway World
Embraced Body Announces How We Move Program
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Dance Informa
Embraced Body Announces How We Move Program
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Stance on Dance
Leaning into BIPOC Disability Dance Community: An Interview with How We Move cohort artist Devin Hill
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Stance on Dance
Learning by Example: An Interview with How We Move cohort artist Zen Spencer
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Stance on Dance
Belonging in Dance, in Art, on this Planet: An Interview with How We Move cohort artist Assaleh Bibi
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Stance on Dance
Newfound Confidence: An Interview with How We Move cohort artist Jackie Robinson
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Stance on Dance
Piloting Accessible Majorette Dance: An Interview with How We Move cohort artist Hector Machado
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Stance on Dance
Moving at The Speed of Access: An Interview with How We Move Program Director India Harville and Program Manager JJ Omelagah
FUNDED BY MELLON FOUNDATION
