Anito Gavino (formerly Ani Gavino) is a Filipinx multidisciplinary artist, movement scholar, and cultural worker from Panay Island, Philippines. As an artistic practitioner, Gavino generates embodied and digital narratives as a catalyst for community discourse, critical inquiry, cultural preservation, and social justice mobilization. Her scholarship focuses on the cross-pollinating intersections between Africanist dances such as Jazz, Caribbean dances, and her very own Indigenous dances of the Philippines.
Gavino’s dance career highlights include dancing with Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Latin Ballet of Virginia, Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, and Ananya Dance Theater. She is a recipient of the 2021 Leeway Transformation Award and Career Transition for Dancers, a grant awardee of the MAPfund 2020, 2022, National Performance Network 2020, 2021, Leeway Art for Social Change, Scribe Video Center, Velocity Fund Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Independent Public Media Fund, and more. Gavino also directs her community-based dance company, AniMalayaWorks, which, in her native tongue, means Harvesting Liberation. She shares this dance theater collaborative with her first-generation immigrant teen daughter, Malaya Ulan.
Ani/MalayaWorks Dancers is a collective of Filipina/o/x and Latine movement artists working together to resist internalized racism within our communities and empower global South stories into the ether of American contemporary performance art. Follow us on Instagram at ani_malayaworks and at www.anigavino.com.
