Research Philosophy

My research is grounded in the belief that the body is not merely a subject of study, but a site of knowledge. Movement carries cultural memory, lineage, and meaning that cannot be fully captured through text alone. As a result, my work asks how media can serve the body rather than displace it, supporting the transmission of embodied knowledge across time, communities, and educational contexts.

I approach research as practice-based, public-facing, and situated, operating at the intersection of dance, media systems, and pedagogy. Much of my work emerges from a recognition that dance is historically underrepresented in both scholarly archives and popular memory, particularly forms rooted in marginalized communities. When dance histories are documented, they are often fragmented, flattened, or stripped of context. My research responds by developing methods and tools that support fidelity in documentation; not as a claim to objectivity, but as an ethical commitment to lineage, authorship, and cultural specificity.

A significant component of my research involves teaching members of the dance field how to document their own histories. This includes training artists, educators, and students in accessible media practices so that documentation is not outsourced or gatekept, but embedded within the community itself. I view this pedagogical work as inseparable from research: when practitioners are equipped to record their own movement histories with care, the archive becomes more representative, resilient, and alive.

Across my projects—screendance, interactive installations, documentary filmmaking, and digital platforms—I leverage media as a method of inquiry rather than a neutral container. Cinematography becomes choreographic; interfaces become embodied encounters; archives become interactive environments. Whether designing gesture-based systems for navigating dance history, constructing large-scale installations, or producing broadcast documentaries, I treat media decisions as analytical acts that shape how movement is understood, remembered, and taught.

Public scholarship is a guiding principle of my work. While grounded in scholarly inquiry, my research is designed to circulate widely through exhibitions, public media, educational residencies, and digital platforms. These modes allow research to remain accountable to the communities it represents, while also expanding access to dance knowledge for learners who may never encounter it within traditional academic settings. Conversation, performance, and facilitated engagement are not add-ons to this work; they are integral research methods that allow knowledge to be generated collectively and in context.

Collaboration and ethics are foundational to my research philosophy. Many of the questions I pursue around embodiment, authorship, and preservation require interdisciplinary collaboration across dance, media production, engineering, and education. I approach these collaborations with attention to credit, care, and transparency, recognizing that how research is made matters as much as what it produces.

Looking forward, my research continues to explore how emerging media systems can support the transmission of embodied knowledge without erasing the body’s central role. I am particularly interested in scalable, accessible tools that allow dance histories to be recorded, activated, and taught across diverse contexts. Ultimately, my work seeks to ensure that dance is preserved not as artifact alone, but as lived knowledge carried forward through bodies in motion.

Works in Progress

I am currently developing an interactive, motion capture-based screendance environment that extends my practice-based research into authorship, spectatorship, and spatial perception in movement-mediated media. This project explores how choreographic meaning shifts when audiences are granted agency within a three-dimensional performance environment rather than positioned as fixed viewers of a linear screen work. Using motion capture, real-time rendering, and user-controlled visual perspective, the system investigates screendance as a navigable spatial experience, where choreography unfolds through interaction rather than playback alone. The work is being developed as a modular research prototype designed to analyze how audiences select and inhabit visual perspectives when granted full agency within a screendance environment, treating interaction itself as a form of research data enabling analysis of spectatorship, visual agency, and the spectator-as-author paradigm within screendance.

In parallel, I am leading the development of CurtainConnect, a platform-based research initiative focused on ethical, high-fidelity documentation of dance and performance histories. The platform translates archival best practices into accessible workflows for artists, organizations, and educators, addressing long-standing gaps in how movement-based knowledge is recorded and preserved. Central to this research is the StoryCapture tool, conceived and prototyped by me as a core methodological intervention within the platform, which enables individuals without institutional support or media production access to create autobiographical recordings through structured oral history prompts developed in collaboration with dance oral history scholar Dr. Candace Feck. Designed to lower barriers to entry while maintaining scholarly rigor, StoryCapture expands who is able to author, preserve, and circulate their own movement histories by combining oral history methodology with emerging AI-assisted support.

Building on my work with the Virtual Dance Collection®, this platform positions documentation itself as a research methodology that supports public scholarship, pedagogical use, and community-based authorship. Together, these works in progress reflect an ongoing commitment to research that builds sustainable systems for movement, media, and memory, extending practice-based inquiry beyond individual artworks toward field-wide impact.