I am a choreographer rooted in the expressive tradition of Urban Midwest Storytelling—a living continuation of the blues, reimagined in post-industrial cities shaped by the Great Migration. My work lives between subtle gesture and full-bodied movement, where a glance or shift of weight holds the same emotional weight as an explosive phrase that fills the space. I use the body as a vessel for emotional truth—a language translating the soul’s response to adversity, joy, and memory.

My creative process is improvisational and deeply collaborative, often created alongside live musicians. Together, we shape the physical and sonic worlds in real time—not layering dance over sound or sound over dance, but co-creating an emotional landscape. The dancers are musicians. The musicians are dancers. This call-and-response is central to the Black Diasporic tradition. We dig deep into that raw, spiritual well—and the fruit we find becomes our performance.

At the heart of my work is storytelling—not just personal, but intergenerational. I create dances that carry the stories of Black families in America, especially those like mine: shaped by migration, memory, and resilience. I grew up in a multigenerational home in Akron, Ohio, with my great-grandmother—born in Elizabeth, Mississippi, in 1915, deep in the Delta—who was likely the child or grandchild of enslaved people. The home I was raised in held the memory of that migration—the weight and spirit passed down through generations.

The mud of Mississippi becomes the rust of the Midwest. Cotton fields become factories. Spirituals become jazz. And the blues becomes my movement.

I see my work as a continuation of this legacy. Urban Midwest Storytelling is the blues in a new context—a language of survival, imagination, and possibility. It’s expression born from struggle, yet infused with the heroic optimism that defines Black American cultural life. I want people to feel the blues in my choreography—not as a musical style, but as a spirit: the will to find beauty amid the wreckage.

What makes my work unique is its lineage. It’s not theoretical—it’s personal, ancestral, embodied. It draws from Black Southern migration, jazz and spirituals, factory towns and front porches, childhood memories and inherited grief, and the quiet power of Black families using stories to survive and thrive. My work is both archive and prophecy—a living record of where we’ve been and a bold vision of what we carry forward.

I approach the creative process as documentation and performance as living archive. Like the West African griot, I see myself as a contemporary storyteller—a cultural keeper of memory and witness. I am an American griot, using the movement to preserve, honor, and reimagine the ever-evolving story of Black life in this country.