Photo by Anna Maynard
ABOUT
Leah is a choreographer, dancer, and teacher based out of Brooklyn, NY (Munsee Lenape and Canarsie land), and originally from Durham, NC (Eno, Lumbee, Shakori, Sissapahaw, and the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation land). At times, she is also a gardener, an elder-care companion, a musician, a facilitator, and a writer. Her research revolves around embodied intuition, dying and decay practices, endurance, and building worlds of movement through deep-dives into things like slime-molds. Leah has taught and shared her work in a variety of locations including the American Dance Festival, Elon University, University of Michigan, Ponderosa Tanzland festival, Gibney Dance, the Hemispheric Institute, and PROTEO|media+performance’s Post/Futures Festival.
As a collaborator/performer, Leah has worked on projects with Okwui Okpokwasili, Kendra Portier|BAND, Anna Barker/Real Live People, Sara Hook, Alexis Blake, and Tommy DeFrantz/SLIPPAGE among others. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she received the Excellence in Teaching for Undergraduate Education Award, as well as the the Wanda M. Nettl Prize for Choreography with collaborator Mauriah Donegan Kraker (L+M). Leah is currently an Artist-in-Residence at MOtiVE Brooklyn, as well as a 2023 MacDowell Fellow with L+M.