Zaquia Mahler Salinas

My work as a dance and social practice artist is to engage in meaningful collaborations with my community that support liberation and empowerment. With the NEFA Dance Fund grant, I will participate in trauma informed somatic training programs with the aim to hone my capacity for facilitating healthy dance spaces. Creating body-based art is a complex relational practice, and necessitates educated and prepared facilitators. Individual artists bring their personal histories, and the culture of western concert dance continues to perpetuate harmful practices and working environments. This training will allow me to more skillfully work with the individual and collective embodied histories of dance artists within movement-based processes from a trauma informed place to support alternative paradigms for communal creative practice.