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I have chosen to let my practice-based questions direct my intellectual inquiry. As a dance artist working with Haitian, African and contemporary dance, my master's thesis, and doctoral dissertation evolved out of questions that arose as I sought to experiment with making movement and dance in an ethical way while dancing for a variety of companies and receiving mentorship from international artists. My MA work in Dance involved dancing and collaborating with company JAKA in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and focused on the choreographies of power in women's choreographic projects. This work set the groundwork for my doctoral research in which I posed questions surrounding theories of tradition and contemporaneity in relation to race and diaspora in Haitian dance as they arose in my artistic practices and experiences.

The theoretical materials garnered from my MA and Ph.D. work became the points of original intersection for my choreographic work in Port-au-Prince working with hybrid dance forms and for the formation of my dance company the CCBdance Project, which was created in 2006 while I was writing my dissertation. The CCBdance Project is a postmodern dance company that works with a base of African and Caribbean movement as well as modern and postmodern movement. The company works with the thematic materials of travel, race, peace, translation, violence and interculturalism in new works made for the stage, improvisations, site-specific installations, and dance films.

As a mixed Diasporic, Jewish American (Ashkenazi and Mizrahi), dance artist, my practices and work with African and Caribbean artists has contributed deeply to my understanding of interculturalism. I have sought out elders' and mentors' advice and ways of becoming deeply connected to people and practices. These connections and practices are evidenced in the way I make work, my movement, my use of music, patterns of movement research, methods of improvising, and stage presence. My current plan of research engages practice as research methods in African contemporary dance practices, which include, dance making, collaboration, improvisation, and movement research. Most recently I have been exploring in solo work, site-dance, and with collaborators ways of waxing and waning into accumulated score and mise-en-scene. I am also working on a book length manuscript "Improvising Coalitions" that analyzes the overlaps in Jewish and African diasporas through the lenses of interculturalism, somatics, improvisation, and process. This project addresses practice as research work in African Contemporary Dance in the US, Haiti, and Africa as well the overlaps of Jewish and African Diasporas in relation to the histories of these practices, race, diaspora, and decolonization.