Gabby Carmichael

I am a dance artist and movement educator currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York and Western Massachusetts. I determined to reveal myself with a provocative and compassionate voice. My artistic practice always begins with movement and I utilize my physical body as a method of inquiry, empowerment, and breath. By collaging my movement with language, sound, and visual design, I create a practice that foregrounds choreography- a place where I can further imagine, process, and embody. I am attracted to perspiration and risk, and my artistic work is eminently energetic and involves rigorous physicality paired with theatrics, vulnerability, and often comedy. My aesthetic is informed by my upbringing in Western Massachusetts, by the cloudy intersections of memory and grief alongside mountains, forests, rivers, and stars.  I consider my work ​​intrinsically queer and emboldened by artists, mentors, and scholars such as Faye Driscoll, Julie Mayo, Mayfield Brooks, Heather Acs, and Audre Lorde. While absorbed with notions of other-ing, other-ness, and being other-ed, I strive to create work that constructs and exposes intersectional, radical, queer narratives. 

As I continue to evolve as an artist, I would like to see my art develop as a means to continue to support and progress within a mindful and radical society. I participate with movement practices in order to critically engage with ideas that are larger and more complicated than me: whiteness, femininity, appropriation, healing, and collective restoration. I am dedicated to anti-racist and anti-capitalist art-making that helps me reckon with my own position of listening and learning. My artistic practice is the process through which I am able to remain reflexive about my privileged body in space while practicing and performing. 

I have been an artist in residence at Leimay, Gibney, MOtiVE Brooklyn, The Floor on Atlantic, The Field Center, and the Helix Queer Performance Network, and my work has been performed with Gibney, Triskelion Arts Center, Movement Research at Judson Church, Freeskewl, Dixon Place, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn Ballet, Mark Morris Dance Center, and the Craft, among others. I graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2014 with dual degrees in Dance and Anthropology, and I am current MFA in Dance Fellow at Smith College.