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. |
Lela earned a Bachelor of Science in Health Science Education with a concentration in Community Health from the University of Florida (2000), a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from Florida State University (2004), and a doctorate degree from Texas Woman’s University in Dance Theory and Practice (2018). The focus of her doctoral research included orientations around nomadic/migrating identities, diasporic citizenship, as well as collective philosophies and practices of integrity in Black and African diasporic dance teaching, choreography, and performance. Lela is currently a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow at Bryn Mawr College. She continuously serves the fields of dance and diasporic studies through her work as a steering committee member for the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving (CDSM).
In addition to her work as an artist and researcher, Lela continues to serve as a teaching artist and arts education consultant for programming with Young Audiences New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania, Live Connections, and Intercultural Journeys. Lela is dedicated to teaching young people and working with teachers to build creative resilience and imagination grounded in privilege locating, social consciousness, cultural specificity, and practices of integrity. Her work here is focused on traditional and contemporary Black/African diasporic dance, creating communities through dance making, and movement based creative action for social change.
Lela’s work is steeped in working with communities that often do not have an opportunity to engage the world through their bodies and is especially interested in women that have faced overwhelming challenges in life. Her most recent work in this area was with leaders of Mothers in Charge and the National Homicide Justice Alliance in Philadelphia where she co-created a performance based social action for the 2017 Philadelphia Puerto Rican Parade with members who have lost children to violence. In 2018, her performance and participatory work was commissioned by and launched the Philanthropy Network of Greater Philadelphia’s 2018 Symposium focused on how entering communities by centering their power and not their problems might shift equity potentials of access and prosperity.
In addition to her work as an artist and researcher, Lela continues to serve as a teaching artist and arts education consultant for programming with Young Audiences New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania, Live Connections, and Intercultural Journeys. Lela is dedicated to teaching young people and working with teachers to build creative resilience and imagination grounded in privilege locating, social consciousness, cultural specificity, and practices of integrity. Her work here is focused on traditional and contemporary Black/African diasporic dance, creating communities through dance making, and movement based creative action for social change.
Lela’s work is steeped in working with communities that often do not have an opportunity to engage the world through their bodies and is especially interested in women that have faced overwhelming challenges in life. Her most recent work in this area was with leaders of Mothers in Charge and the National Homicide Justice Alliance in Philadelphia where she co-created a performance based social action for the 2017 Philadelphia Puerto Rican Parade with members who have lost children to violence. In 2018, her performance and participatory work was commissioned by and launched the Philanthropy Network of Greater Philadelphia’s 2018 Symposium focused on how entering communities by centering their power and not their problems might shift equity potentials of access and prosperity.