MFA in Dance

Zhixhuan (Miki) Zhu, MFA in Dance ’23: Infinite Infant

Zhixuan (Miki) Zhu is an artist, movement explorer and spirituality devotee. Born in a traditional Buddhist family, she was fascinated by the occult since an early age, and her dance is inspired by it. Her thesis project Infinite Infant is a forty-minute live performance situated in a cosmic underworld. Through dual movements, two entangled feminine spirits share and unveil the infinite reincarnations that elevate love.

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Leo Ryan, MFA in Dance ’23: for public view (twenty-four)

Leo Ryan is an interdisciplinary movement-based performance and video artist. Their thesis project for public view (twenty-four) is a solo installation performance that explored queer and transcorporealities in the American South by combining movement, video art and speaking segments derived from memory work-based interviews with another queertrans collaborator from Alabama.

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Marika Niko, MFA in Dance ’23: Meshroom

Marika Niko is a choreographer, mover and thinker from Japan. They choreograph immersive, multi-sensorial, embodied gatherings and experiences for audiences to explore different ways of relating relationships to space, to time, to other humansand to other non-humans. Her thesis project Meshroom creates a performance environment that forms an intellectual/intentional community around an open dancefloor.

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Brooks Emanuel, MFA in Dance ’23: Moving New Futures

Brooks pursued his M.F.A. to find the most effective ways for him to combine his dual backgrounds in dance and social justice work. For his thesis research, Brooks developed the Moving New Futures workshop, which uses improvisatory movement to help social justice practitioners imagine new possibilities for a just society.

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Lee Edwards, MFA in Dance ’22: Cyclical Navigations: In the In Between

Lee Edwards is an interdisciplinary movement artist and storyteller whose primary modes of making are through dance and poetry. Their thesis project Cyclical Navigations: In the In Between conceptualizes storytelling as a practice of embodied memory recollection—one that aids in the navigation of cyclical temporalities in the present, or the “In Between.”

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Amari Jones, MFA in Dance ’22: Embodied Resonance

Amari Jones’s research at Duke encompasses racial identity formation processes and the specific roles that the public K-12 educational system plays in these processes. Her Embodied Resonance workshops were an improvisational movement practice where participants danced to Black-produced and voiced podcasts, music, and lectures to investigate and better understand their own Black identities.

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Ayan Felix MFA in Dance ‘21: Dance Performance As a Social Movement

Ayan Felix is an MFA in Dance student researching how physical and social improvisational practices interact in spaces that affirm Blackness and gender fluidity. Their research relies on multidisciplinary collaboration to choreograph worlds that blur the line of audience-participant, performance-practice and artist-organizer.

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Juliet Irving MFA in Dance ‘21: I Am. We Are.

Juliet Irving is a trans-disciplinary movement artist and graphic designer who creates interactive and immersive experiences that emphasize modes of embodiment. Her thesis, I Am. We Are., is a series of immersive, pop-up performance installations situated in forested sites on Duke campus that activate new worlds and ways of being for Black femme to exist within.

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Alyah Baker MFA in Dance ‘21: “Quare Dance”

Alyah Baker, MFA in Dance ’21, is a dance artist and scholar working at the intersection of art and embodied activism. Her thesis project, “Quare Dance: Fashioning a Black, Queer, Fem(me)inist Aesthetic in Ballet,” examines the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in ballet through the lens of Black Queer Women.

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