Brigette Dunn-Korpela is a choreographer, performer, and educator whose work activates Black diasporic memory, somatic intelligence, and transdisciplinary performance as pathways toward cultural and imaginative liberation. She blends rigorous physical practice with world-building, immersive technologies, and socially engaged inquiry. She was recently named a finalist for the 2025 Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists Program, a national award recognizing visionary dance-based artists advancing social change and community transformation.
Her creative research draws from Black feminist thought, diaspora studies, somatic practice, and performance theory. Working at the intersections of geography, embodiment, memory, and temporality, Dunn-Korpela explores the body as a conduit for cultural knowledge, ancestral presence, and embodied intelligence. Her work engages practices of wake work, embodied archives, and Black geographies—drawing inspiration from scholars such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Christina Sharpe, Katherine McKittrick, Saidiya Hartman, and Brenda Dixon Gottschild. At the intersection of dance, wearable art/technology, spatial sound, installation, VR/AR, and AI-driven media, she creates immersive performance ecologies that re-map histories and invite new modes of perception.
Dunn-Korpela’s choreography has been presented in venues such as REDCAT, MOCA Geffen, the Center for New Performance, Mobius, L.A. Dance Festival, Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, and South Coast Repertory. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of B. Dunn Movement, now evolving into a new transdisciplinary collective committed to art, technology, and social justice. Her long-term project, ECHO Immersion, continues to expand through collaborations with XR/AI artists, sound, costume and set designers, technologists, and performing artists.
With more than 25 years of experience as a performer and choreographer, she has danced nationally and internationally. A former Dance Captain and original cast member of the 1st National Tour of The Lion King, and a former member of Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and PHILADANCO II, she has performed works by Katherine Dunham, Garth Fagan, Eleo Pomare, Milton Myers, Ronald K. Brown, Donald McKayle, and many other seminal choreographers who shaped African diasporic and contemporary dance. These embodied lineages deeply inform her artistic vision, pedagogy, and commitment to cultivating expansive, critically engaged dance artists rooted in cultural lineage, collective care, and artistic rigor.
