mayfield brooks

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their dance film, Whale Fall, a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

[Image Description: mayfield, a brown skinned person with long brown braids, is in a brightly lit dance space in a church, their body in a backbend forming an arc with their head touching the floor, arms extended towards the ceiling. They are wearing a red tank top and pink and purple sweatpants. In the background, Dorothy, a light skinned brown person is sitting with an upright electric cellist and behind her is a tan carpeted altar with steps to an arched wall.]