photo credit: Lela Aisha Jones
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Lela Aisha Jones is a movement performance artist and an interdisciplinary collaborator. Her work intimately intertwines personal and collective lived experiences of diasporic blackness as archived in and excavated from the body through dance. She is a proud native of Tallahassee, FL and feels quite fortunate to live and create in Philadelphia, PA. Her movement manifestations are grounded in notions of a traditional continuum and her current artistic, research, educational, and pedagogical orientations are inquiries into embodied restorative activism, a diasporic nomadic, diasporic citizenship, embodied memoir, and reviving the body to thriving, through temporal release and restoration. Lela is a 2015 Leeway Foundation Transformation Awardee, a 2016 Pew Fellow in the Arts, and a 2017 New York Dance and Performance Award | Bessie Nominee.
As an organizer, Lela is invested in cultivating a society with more nurtured, insightful, and harmonized human beings and she continues to bring people together in support of eachothers’ development through initiatives such as Dancing for Justice Philadelphia and The Requisite Movers Philadelphia. Furthermore, Lela is currently a Project Co-Director for Modupúe | Ibaye: The Philadelphia Yoruba Performance Project and is the Associate Artistic Director for Brownbody led by Artistic Director Deneane Richburg. Lela’s vast work is generously and continually supported by the Artist in Residence program at the Community Education Center and the Incubated Artist Program at Headlong. |