Biba Bell (b. 1976, Sebastopol) is a writer, dancer, and choreographer based in Detroit. Her performance work has been presented in France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Canada, and across the U.S. She was a Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow, a DAAD guest professor of Experimental Performance in Germany, and earned a PhD in performance studies from New York University. She is currently an Associate Professor of Dance at Wayne State University. Her research interests include contemporary choreography, site-specificity, domesticity, artistic labor, intersections between dance and architecture, eco-somatics, social practice, and dance in visual art contexts. Her current project, Tree Dances: Becoming Epiphyte, focuses on post-anthropocentric dance practices that center arts activism and arboreal relations through the lens of what she theorizes as epiphytic choreographies. She has worked with numerous artists, including Davide Balula, Gelsey Bell, Nick Cave, Walter Dundervill, Jessie Gold, Maria Hassabi, Joan Jonas, Nicola Kuperus, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Gabriel Rivera, and Yuval Sharon. She was a member of the performance collective Modern Garage Movement (2005-2011, 2021) with Jmy James Kidd, Felicia Ballos, and Paige Martin, and edited a self-published book on the collective (2022). Bell’s writing on dance and performance is published in numerous journals. Of her dancing the New York Times writes “It’s invigorating to watch someone who borders on wild.”
