About Meg.
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A queer dance artist, educator, and parent, I create performances and somatic-based events as self-affirming practices, inviting audiences to engage with concepts through their own bodily experiences. Trained in visual art and dance, I use movement, design, and choreographic thinking to create containers for bodily engagement and reflection on a somatic present, on the power and location of the body itself as participant. My work exists in moments of virtuosic performance as much as in my 8 yr old and me collaborating on squeezing foam into a bag.
I currently research gay and trans family experience, geology, human sexuality and gestation, and how we are formed. A rigorous body-based researcher, my choreographic practice is rooted in sensorial investigation, questions of how interiority meets shape and architecture, and organizing how this accumulates and evolves over time to change energetic space and how we perceive the environment. I build detailed movement vocabularies and improvisational tasks out of scientifically-engaged research and lived experience. In a loving tumble with formalism in dance and what constitutes performance, I work on a continuum of research that centers the 24-hour body and asks how identity is felt, occupied, and transformed: an all-the-time, ever-shifting self, a sacred site, a portal, a prism. Once an intricate movement generator who designed dances from the intertwined inside/outside, I explored performative experience as material via solo practice from 2010-15. This highlighted collective exchange and witness as a central conceit. Through practice with expanding thought and movement partners, I developed action is primary (2010-2017), an improvisational performance practice that trains a hyper-articulate interiority in direct dialogue with shape/form/feeling/being as choreography that has become the core materiality of my practice. In The 3:15 Project I danced everyday at 3:15pm, including during childbirth, wherever I was for 6 yrs; Tender Hotel was a 24-hr virtual, international hotel during Covid’s height that brought performance to people’s homes, including care packages and domestic scores; and a National Center for Choreography Akron Dancing Lab explored artistic and parenting practice overlap with fellow artist parents. With Blood Baby, I research geologic time and our material lineage in deep time as Earthly belonging and kinship, placing geology in relationship to human sexuality, gestation, queer kinship structures, and gender. Serial in nature, each project attempts to answer questions posed by the previous work. My work takes shape through long processes and extensive creative and conceptual research. I repurpose materials—choreographic principles and sculptural objects—creating a visible and contiguous lineage. My work has been presented at TanzFabrik Potsdam, Art Stations Foundation at Malta Festival, Prague Quadrennial, SummerWorks Festival (Toronto), LA Performance Practice, DraftWork at Danspace Project, CATCH! at Invisible Dog Art Center, Philadelphia Contemporary, and Philadelphia Fringe Festival (curated), Moore College of Art and Design, Pilot+Projects, and Vox Populi. Grants include: National Performance Network, Leeway Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Independence Fdtn, Dancemakers Centre for Creation, and a Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant. I have taught across the US and abroad. I also co-direct The Whole Shebang, a space that provides a South Philly home for the practices of working artists and teachers. It is intended as a space for experimentation, energy collision, and supported trying-out-of-things. Raised by a single mom in the DC area, I was a creative movement kid who grew up to lots of club dancing. I am now a queerdo homeschooling mama in a trans family with 2 kids and an elderly pitbull in Philadelphia on the stolen lands of the Lenni Lenape people. View my CV here.
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