BODY AND SOUL: Valencia James: Dancing ancestry

Valencia James (photo: Botond Bognar)

 

A dark-skinned Black woman, with shoulder-length locs looks into the camera and smiles. The sun casts a soft golden wash on her face. She is wearing a red and orange patterned dress and wooden circular earrings.

Listen to Valencia James: Dancing ancestry on my Body and Soul podcast here.

Valencia James is an interdisciplinary artist from Barbados interested in the intersection between dance, theater, technology, art installation and activism. Her works have explored remote interdisciplinary collaboration, artist-driven open-source software tools and the combination of live performance with immersive interactive technologies. Currently, she is researching the relationship between performance and play and how traditional Caribbean cultural and spiritual forms have been used by communities in active resistance and problem-solving in the face of colonial systems.

Valencia has been a 2020 Rapid Response Fellow at Eyebeam NYC and a 2021-2022 Sundance Interdisciplinary Fellow. She has presented work at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2015, SIGGRAPH 2021, and the 2022 New Frontier exhibition at Sundance Film Festival. Valencia has participated in group exhibitions in Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Budapest, San Francisco and Berkeley. http://valenciajames.com/