mayfield brooks

Performance Journal Co-Editor-in-Chief

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 2022-23 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

  • MELT
  • Artist in Residence
  • 2024 summer melt
  • 2023 summer MELT
  • 2017 Artist in Residence
  • Faculty
  • Performance Journal Editor-in-Chief
  • Publishing
  • The Sounding Body Faculty
  • Workshop Faculty
Brown skinned person with short black kinky hair, wearing sheer sparkly dress and gold satin blind fold, back curved, one foot forward, one foot back, in the sand, left hand holding gold fabric and extended horizontally, right hand touching the sand, body at he shoreline, at the point where the ocean meets the sand, light blue ocean. Photo by Nir Arieli
ID: Brown skinned person with short black kinky hair, wearing sheer sparkly dress and gold satin blind fold, back curved, one foot forward, one foot back, in the sand, left hand holding gold fabric and extended horizontally, right hand touching the sand, body at he shoreline, at the point where the ocean meets the sand, light blue ocean. Photo by Nir Arieli

Past classes and workshops

  • Jul 29 - Aug 2, 2024WavesCategory: Workshop