paris cyan cian is a New Orleans Black girl playing and composing with devotion, through an embodied ceremonial practice in nature and beyond. As a movement architect, educator, and curator working with and through various interdisciplinary forms of dance, drawing, film, photography, and sound, cyan’s creative work mobilizes embodied memory and ecological play into a worldmaking practice. Performance exhibitions/installations, practices, and organizing include Common Healing, T.Lang Dance, Liberated Planet Studio, The Black School, Los Angeles Dance Festival, Ritual Knowledge, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum Virginia, Radical XChange, Saint Heron, BlackGirlGeniusWeek/SOLHOT, No)one. Art House LA, and Dancing Grounds. Cyan cian received her BFA/BA in Dance with a concentration in social justice, gender women’s studies from Hollins University (2018) and Masters of Fine Arts in Choreography at Roehampton University, London, U.K (2021).

While in residency, Paris worked on her performance called “modjeskamodjeskamodjeska”, a multisite durational multidisciplinary performance installation investigating the embodied activation of prayer, calling attention to the erosion of our coastlines due to rising sea levels and Hurricanes. In this installation, she honors the restorative practice of the oyster body as a tool for ancestral protection of land and memory. Our effort to explore and recall methods of grief and celebration through land honoring is an embodied memorial practice.

Headshot by Fernando Lopez.