BIOGRAPHY
Nailah Randall-Bellinger
Nailah Randall-Bellinger (she/her) is a dance educator and scholar. For over thirty-five years, she has taught modern and contemporary classes throughout the United States and abroad at national conventions and universities. She has studied, performed, and lectured in Brazil, Ghana, Haiti, the Czech Republic, and Senegal. She has worked with film director and poet S. Pearl Sharp, and performed as a member of Karen McDonald’s New Age Dance Workshop dance company and Jamie Nichols Fast Feet, Inc. After receiving a Masters degree from Lesley University with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Studies: Dance, and African American literature, she began to focus and develop the concept of the “dancing text” as a means to explore the corporeality of dance. In 2015, Randall-Bellinger collaborated with a group of artists in Cambridge to give voice to the voiceless in the production of Stories Without Roofs: Transitions, featuring essays, monologues, poetry, songs, dance, and general musings of residents of shelters in the city of Cambridge. She has created original work for Boston-based contemporary dance company Urbanity and was choreographer for the Boston production Ragtime at Wheelock Family Theatre. In 2020, she was awarded the Alorie Parkhill Learning and Travel Grant to study expressions of dance in South East Asia. Randall-Bellinger currently serves as the Chair of the Dance Department at The Cambridge School of Weston. She has been a teaching artist at Harvard Dance Center for over a decade In Spring 2021, Randall-Bellinger facilitated the first of a series of virtual artist-led discussions around artistry, identity, and advocacy, where she presented her film works #shesstillbreathing and Women’s Work, both inspired and constructed within the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic. She is one of seven artists commissioned by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA) in 2021 to create a new work on campus. The work, titled Initiation–In Love Solidarity, explores the resilience and evolving identity of women of the African diaspora.