Rochelle Jamila is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist, dancer, folk herbalist, shapeshifter, and womb/ birth worker hailing from Oka Nashoba or Memphis, Tennessee. Rochelle’s choreographic practice imagines liberation through Nature’s cycles, folk practices of the African diaspora, and the physical and psychic realms of women. She is particularly inspired by the cultures of the Deep South and the Mississippi Delta, her studies of Tibetan Buddhism, and her participation in lunar rituals derived from ancient Aztec traditions. Rochelle graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts in Dance and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. Rochelle’s work has been presented in Tennessee, New York and the Netherlands at venues such as Judson Church, Snug Harbor Botanical Garden, Triskelion Arts, The Buckman Theater, and University of Amsterdam. She was a 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Resident, 2020 Gibney Moving Toward Justice Fellow and a 2023 EarthDance Resident. Since graduating, she has notably worked with Ebony Noelle Golden, Ogemdi Ude, Jasmine Hearn, Jodi Melnick, Joanna Kotze, Beth Gill, Maria Bauman, and Reggie Wilson among others. Rochelle is currently a member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Reggie Wilson Fist & Heel Performance Group. In her free time she enjoys reading, foraging for wild herbs, and supporting her community as a herbalist and womb health guide.

During her residency, Rochelle will continue her exploration of the blues and musical traditions of the Mississippi delta begun in her recent work Testimony. She will research how storytelling and sonic and embodied archives function as tools for resilience and resistance along the lower Mississippi River delta and investigate Black music traditions of the region as frameworks for surviving apocalypse and environmental disaster. She is particularly interested in studying these musics and histories as archives, story medicine, and oracle developed in relation with the lands along the Mississippi River.