2025 Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis (MFAEIP) Graduate
Sadé M. Jones is a choreographer, a social psychologist, an alchemist, and in her own words “a healer”. She approaches her work with a rare and profoundly embodied wisdom—one that doesn’t simply interpret theory, but breathes it into being. Her research is rooted where dance, Black Feminist thought, and embodied knowledge converge, and she treats movement as a powerful methodology for both rethinking the past and imagining liberated futures. What I find most powerful about Sadé’s work is how she treats the body as a dynamic site of performance, AND as a living archive—an ancestral vessel carrying memory, resistance, and possibility. She moves through her research with a clarity of vision that is rooted in care, curiosity, and rigorous exploration. Her thesis project, Melanated Chrysalis, is a profound example of this. Through immersive performance and ritual, she creates a multisensory experience where transformation can unfold—where movement becomes a language of remembrance, and where Black identity is constantly assembled and reassembled, and honored in its complexity, fluidity, and power.
At the heart of her practice is The Womb Cypher—a communal, ritual-based space where storytelling, movement, and healing converge. It is here that she models what it means to do scholarship that is intellectually generative, deeply nurturing and grounded in community. Her work is about presence, about wellness, about lineage, about love.
Sadé brings theory into motion, weaving together dance, somatics, conjure feminism, and diasporic studies with grace and precision. Her work continually reminds me that research can be sacred, and that our bodies hold more wisdom than we sometimes know. It’s an honor to witness her journey—and to walk alongside her as she crafts such visionary, necessary work.
—Ava LaVonne Vinesett
Professor of the Practice of Dance
Duke University Dance Program
The goal of my work as an artist and healer is to discover the ways ceremonial performance can affect socio-cultural identities. I am curious about the dynamic relationship between the performer, the art, and culture. My creative process over the past five years is based on taking in cultural material, interacting with it internally, then producing something to reinforce or challenge the societal elements the cultural material comes from. I use this process to synergize truths within and across social groups. Currently, I’m discovering ways to use this process to prevent the contraction and stagnation of energy that isn’t of benefit – especially for historically marginalized communities. The process results in a creative product that initiates an internal process for others – performers of the work and its audiences.
My works are an integrative care initiative for mind, body, spirit. Folks of the African Diaspora have been disconnected from their indigenous ways deliberately and as an act of self preservation. Alas, the root ways of our ancestors are more and more the medicine for our afflictions. It is my theory that “the old ways” have survived in subtle expressions through art and culture. I use my artistic, cultural and healing practices along with my spiritual mediums as a conduit to preserve the bridge of old and new and build upon it in ways that are familiar enough to entice people to cross. This contemporary griot role is fundamental to reconnecting people to the collective unconscious where so much healing lives; using the ideas of African traditional practices throughout the Diaspora in the pieces I create. My creative process manifests in three ways: infusing psychological, somatic and spiritual approaches into dance training, curating immersive ritual theatre, and facilitating healing that centers community work in the creation of art.
Sadé M Jones is a movement alchemist. She is a dancer, choreographer, theater, Social Psychologist, griot and energy worker. Her research and practice lives within the intersections and fringes of somatic, cultural discourse, performance and the healing arts. Her healing practice, SADEIZM Movement Alchemy provides artistic, mindful and culturally relevant ways for individuals and groups to embody innate wholeness and walk their path with it.
Her award-winning work has been featured at Dixon Place, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, University of Texas at Austin, The Long Center, University of Louisville, Collegium of African Diasporic Dance and American Collegiate Dance Festival. Her work on the film Dark Matters was premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and inducted into the Criterion Collection. Her work bringing life to music videos can be seen with Magna Carda, Riders Against the Storm and Trouble in the Streets. She was featured on PBS Arts In Context as well as in Voyage Austin and Eastside Magazine.
Sadé has made an impact through her workshops and trainings with SXSW, Facebook, Texas Health & Human Services, University Federal Credit Union, CASA and Waterloo Greenway, University of Texas at Austin, Duke Creates and more. She curates artistic, mindful and culturally relevant ways for individuals and groups to embody innate wholeness and address otherwise ‘charged’ topics in a heartfelt yet honest way. Her work is heralded as “cathartic, genuine, provocative and beautiful.”
Sadé holds a graduate degree in Social Psychology and is a 2025 candidate for a Master’s of Fine Arts at Duke University studying Dance as Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis.
The Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis (MFAEIP) is a two-year, full-time, terminal degree program grounded in Duke’s interdisciplinary approach. This program encourages research that responds to urgent global issues and joins critical conversations both within and beyond the arts.
