I am an eco-somatic movement practitioner, artivist, researcher and educator.
​I completed my doctoral research Embodied storytelling and the ecological entanglements of distress: practice research of somatic movement through polycrisis,with the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths College, in 2024. In my practice-based PhD, I approach the moving body as an ecologically entangled and storytelling medium, informed by my applied experience working in mental health crisis recovery services and embodied research encountering somatic and dance movement improvisation practices. The activist scholarship of Mad Studies and Critical Mental Health orientate my praxis to question experiences of distress as the sole responsibility of the individual to consider how structural inequities and material environments may also generate experiences of distress in uncertain times. I engage embodied practices, primarily using creative movement as method, to unearth ecologically entangled and collective embodied storytelling. In this way, the methodology I developed through my practice research enables me to politicise personalised experiences in dominant approaches to mental health. The Visual Cultures doctoral researchers Counterfield Collective as well as the Embodied Research Working Group were important spaces of experimentation and reflection in the development of this praxis research.
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​My project enters the field of practice research by identifying a form of new activist scholarship which considers the potential application of the multiple modalities that my practice offers - from mixed dance and creative movement lineage - to respond to current frameworks of power in dance and therapeutic settings within an expanded field of movement studies. The unique signature of this practice, marked by a resistance toward oppressive norms, has yet to be met within current dance and proximate fields such as applied dance, as well as health professional communities of practice, thus responding to a gap within the field of dance and therapy.​
Video credit: Alex Boyd