I am a dancer, writer, wanderer, wonderer, curious about people who use art to collaborate in healing and recreating worlds. At UWB, I teach courses in cultural politics, self-care, dance and performance art as research practice. I collaborate with Professor Anida Yoeu Ali to produce campus and regional arts events through the IAS research group Critical Acts: Socially Engaged Performance, including our Visiting Artist Residency, Alive Performance Festival and Imagine Student Showcase. My book Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics mixes dance ethnography and oral history to tell stories of streetdances created by youth living in Funk and Disco era California, whose everyday artistry helped set foundations for global contemporary hip hop dance. I invented the word ‘kinethic’ to describe how their collective movement practices reorient dancers toward other ways of sensing, being and belonging in ethical relation. Forthcoming with the international Dance Studies Association’s Studies in Dance Series (University of Michigan Press), the book has received support from National Endowment of Humanities, Simpson Center for Humanities, Royalty Research Fund and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. I also collaborate artistically with Milvia Pacheco Salvatierra, Executive Director of Movimiento AfroLatino Seattle. Our current project, Little Brown Language, researches submerged histories of resistance to colonial encounter in Venezuela and the Philippines, translated as dance-incantations. We have performed for On The Boards, Wing Luke Museum and 2022 Reflections Dance Festival. From 2002-2008 I directed DREAM, an Oakland, California-based streetdance company which toured nationally. Our piece Full Circle, a collaboration with hip hop dancer and AfroCuban folklorist José Francisco Barroso, was nominated for the Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Award in Choreography. I have been a New York City Hip Hop Theater Festival Future Aesthetics Artist and received funding from Creative Work Fund, Rennie Harris PureMovement, East Bay Community Foundation and Zellerbach Foundation. My work is deeply informed by three-decades study of African Diaspora dances in the US, Cuba, Brazil and Europe, and underground dancing in clubs and parties of 1990s Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.

MEDIA

• Naomi Macalalad Bragin: Black Power of Hip Hop Dance, On Kinesthetic Politics
• Little Brown Language
•  “Genre et Sexualité en Hip Hop et le Danse Waack.”
• “Danscendances de WAACK Table-Ronde.”
• “The Intimate Assembly.”
• “Shot and Captured: Streetdance from Hood to Screen.”

https://www.naomibragin.com/