Nia Love

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

nia love wears many proverbial hats: choreographer, dancer, professor, installation artist, activist, mother, grandmother, warrior, and educator. Through it all, she continues to expand and destabilize conversations on intersectionality, transnationalism, Blackness, and tools of embodied memory.

In her own words, the center of gravity in her work remains “the question of Blackness and the complexity held within the experiences it names: resistance, virtuosity, breaking, hypermobility, inordinate constraint.” nia aims to destabilize and dismantle what we know as “dance,” redressing it as “gesture”— the memory of movement and geography held in the body. By treating performance as a mode of forging knowledge, her body in movement continues to be a catalyst for social change, transcultural healing practices, and the preservation of ancestral memories.

Upcoming Performances at Harlem Stage

nia love and her collaborators present UNDERcurrents. This multi-media performance and research platform invites audiences to probe the seam between catastrophic history and quotidian memory and tend to the textures of generational care. It pivots on the question, “What remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect?”

These queries are explored through the thematic elements of water and doors. The point of departure for captive Africans into the Middle Passage is described as “the door of no return.” Conjuring the continual resonance of this world-making and breaking threshold, UNDERcurrents is a participatory audience experience with an immersive installation that is activated by performance.

nia’s career began in 1978 when she apprenticed with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in Havana, Cuba. In 1986, she studied Butoh and toured with celebrated Japanese Butoh master Min Tanaka, which profoundly influenced her style and performances. Nia earned her BFA in Theater from Howard University (1987) and her MFA in Choreography from Florida State University (1992). In 2001, she was awarded the Fullbright Fellowship (2001-2003) as a lecturer/researcher in Ghana, Mali, and Togo. 

nia continues to teach, perform, and lecture at some of the most distinguished art and educational institutions and festivals throughout the world, including the American Dance Festival, Fordham/Ailey BFA, BARD, Queens College, University of Colorado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, The New School, UCLA World Arts and Cultures, Texas Woman's University, Princeton Hunter College, NYU Tish School of The Arts, Tanzanian Dance Festival, Williams College, Smith College, Sarah Lawrence College, Florida A&M, Florida State University, Columbia University, Barnard College, and the University of Ghana at Legon. 

In 2016, she was awarded the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and is presently an adjunct professor at Hunter College, Queens College of New York, and The New School.

Nia’s list of choreographed works includes:

  • Ye Who Seeks Balance in the Midst of Chaos Shall Rise to a Warrior's Stance - 1990

  • Pow - 1993

  • Listen, Little Man - 1994

  • Wind at My Back - 1995

  • Bringing' It Together - 2001

  • No Dancing Please! - 2001

  • Residue - 2001

  • g1(host): lostatsea - 2019

  • UNDERcurrents - 2022

Nia’s fellowships and awards:

  • Fulbright Fellow - 2001 to 2003

  • Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist in Residence - 2011 to 2012, 2013 to 2014

  • Suitcase Fund Award/African - 2013 to 2014

  • Middle East Cultural Partnership - 2013 to 2014

  • New Directions Choreographic Laboratory - 2013 to 2014

  • CUNY Dance Initiative - 2014 to 2015

  • Movement Research Artist in Residence - 2016

  • The Bessie Award - 2017

Harlem Stage continues to host an array of diverse performances from Black Artists from all corners of the world — including right here in New York. Stay up to date on upcoming live and digital performances by subscribing to our weekly newsletter.