mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of  the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall, a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist and currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. 

brooks received a B.A. from Trinity College, an M.A. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and a M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis. They also studied somatics and social change at Moving on Center: School for Participatory Arts and Somatic Research and contemporary dance at The School for New Dance Development in The Netherlands.

mayfield thanks their human and non human ancestors for watching over them and protecting them, and is grateful to have lived and danced with Indira C. Suganda (1966-2009)--their former dancer partner and creative soulmate.

IMPROVISING WHILE BLACK (IWB)

mayfield’s choreographic approach, Improvising While Black or IWB, developed after mayfield began to write about their personal experience of being racially profiled as they were Driving While Black or DWB  in San Francisco, California.  IWB is an interdisciplinary dance project that lives in the question of Blackness, and explores vocal and dance improvisation, (de)composition, breath choreographies, and pedagogies of embodied liberation. Like an ecology, IWB is continually evolving and moving in relation to other organisms and environments to conjure ancestral healing with human and non-human ancestors.