nia love is a choreographer, dancer, installation artist, activist, mother, grandmother, warrior, educator and Black American woman who creates performances for the stage, as well as immersive and participatory experiences in galleries, museums, city gardens, river ports, shrines, churches, mosques, slave castles, East and West African farms, and historical architectural sites. Her movement vocabulary - emerging from multiple personal, cultural, and historical sources, is an accumulation of unruly gestures, ruptured forms, and jagged signals - rejects aesthetic seamlessness.

Experimenting with a multitude of ideas, love has broadened the conversation between dance and other disciplines, engaging with critical theorists like Christina Sharpe, regarding “wake work,” and Fred Moten on propositions of liminality and improvisation.

love’s inquiries have also led her to the ocean as a site of knowledge. “What remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect?” she asks. Becoming a registered deep-sea diver has enabled her to move between history and intuition, diving both literally and metaphorically into the transatlantic slave journey from a place of creative, intuitive, unknowing space, and trusting the wisdom of the body to reveal what is beyond words. 

photo: Orion Gordon