Stephanie Hewett is a Black and queer multidisciplinary performing artist of the Dominican and Jamaican diaspora born and raised on Munsee Lenape land colloquially known as the Bronx, New York. She has been creating dance performances as an individual artist and within performance collectives since 2018 upon receiving her MFA in Dance at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Movement and sound are used in her work as tools to conjure body-rooted ancestral messages and to amplify radical Black femme and queer narratives. She believes that movement and sound are the foundations of all Black cultural production and contain the forces to both unify the African diaspora and demystify connections to the ancestral realm. Through improvisation, experimental choreographies, and electronic sound design she investigates the role of capitalism as it relates to all forms of disconnection and asks, “how can movement, sound, and performance practices at the intersection of Black social gatherings and political education help us to reimagine and remember our personal and collective narratives of connection and power? Hewett’s last evening-length piece, (E)cho (Q)ueue, was commissioned at The Lab in San Francisco in 2022 with financial support from the Rainin Foundation. She has held artist residencies at Counterpulse, The Paul Dresher Ensemble, This Will Take Time, Oyoun (Berlin), and most recently at The Watermill Center with her performance collective, RUPTURE. This past summer she performed a collaborative work titled “TRY” at the Impulstanz International Dance Festival in Vienna, Austria.
