Meet our Team!

Star Mitchell (They/Them) is a celestial luminescence of love. A multidisciplinary artist, community facilitator, and choreographer. They are sharing their love through creation as a way to invite, invoke, and reimagine realities.

Star’s performance work is rooted in rebirth, elemental connection, and spiritual dialogue. They create under the motif that love is the intention and rebirth is the score. By re-writing personal narratives surrounding their Black/Latinx ancestry, their movement style combines classical training and intuition. They are producing works that carve new pathways toward healing.

Professionally they have taught movement as a form of interpersonal communication and reworking narratives for arts and literacy programs throughout Manhattan, Staten Island, and Brooklyn (2016-2022). When not coordinating programs for HBB they freelance and create and collaborate works for up-and-coming artists. They have choreographed and performed in collaboration with Oskar Sinclair (“Mammy May I” November 2023), DJ Honey B (“Freak Mode” 2023 ) Bristol Mary Dance Company (2023), and EMERGENYC's Residency Program with Brooklyn Arts Exchange 2023. The Center for Performance Research (Artist in Residence 2022), The Shed’s Open Call as a guest choreographer for Ana María Agüero Jahannes (“Field Day “ 2021). A City Artist Corps Grant recipient (2021). Healing The Black Body Fellowship (2019- 2020), and Mayhem Dance Company while Pursuing their BFA in Dance at SUNY The College at Brockport (2017-2018).

“I’m mostly excited about being able to breathe new life into a pre-existing dream. Being able to offer healing work to a new group of black queer artists. Our mission this year is rooted in unearthing and nurturing artistic and professional development. I look forward to how we will all grow and change together through this process. I am deeply grateful to contribute to the continued dream of safe spaces/utopias for us by us.”

Tj Squire (they/them) walks Earth as a generator of the Black ancestral rage, hope and faith. They are an intuitive movement based artist, musician, community organizer/facilitator, aspiring somatics and movement life coach.

Their work is rooted in intuitive spiritual creation, which dates back to Black ancestral practices of the enslaved south. Their framework is birthed out of the need for release in traumatized Black bodies through intuitive creation; as Black people have always used movement, artistry and sonics since creation to express pain, joy and rage. They believe in the transformative power of movement art, music and creativity as a vessel for inner healing.

Professionally, their collaborative and solo works have been featured at Gibney Dance, Governor’s Island, The Shed and Episcopal Actors Guild. When not serving the community as Co-Director of Healing the Black Body, they are Program Coordinator and facilitator at Just As I am Youth Empowerment, a non-profit that co-creates with youth to promote mindful, healthy and safe communities through transformative personal/leadership development.

“I am most excited for the new iteration of the programming this year, building community and opportunities for our community of Black queer and trans folks. Supporting Black folks with rightful rage!”

Nana Chinara (she/her) creates. She’s Black, Queer, and a gleaming glitterbeam. She dreams up worlds in her body, and offers them to the stage. A performance ritualist, youth educator, and loquacious lover, her artistry is the lens through which she conjures Black Queer Feminist research. Nana is powered by pleasure. She shapes a full body YES. She manifests Black Queer healing and liberation as an ancestral practice. Planting futures in her palms, Nana is in service of all young people who craft an abundantly free world in beyond. Nana is the Artistic Director of Healing the Black Body, and she no longer fears her deepest cravings.

Nana Chinara was 19 years old, when she first discovered that other Black queer people like her existed: the moment she discovered Audre Lorde. Audre Lorde, a “Black Lesbian Mother Warrior Poet”, and her texts left a profound influence on Nana to determine herself, her power, and her self-preservation. Audre Lorde’s work had then gone on to inspire and inform Nana at 21 years old, in making her first evening length solo choreographic work, to Bare the Rose ||| a visual memoir which debuted at Dixon Place in July 2018. It was in this moment that Nana founded Healing the Black Body, after sharing her first performance ritual with her community members.

to Bare the Rose ||| a visual memoir recounted Nana Chinara’s survivorship of intimate partner violence, trauma, and violence against her Black Queer Femme body. During the process of creating to Bare the Rose, Nana Chinara explored a creative practice of meditation, memoir writing, movement research, storytelling and community building. She later developed this into the Healing the Black Body Framework, and knew that it could be replicated for other Black Queer Youth like herself. During her process, she began to notice the power of using performance to work though her traumatic experiences. She felt more whole, full, and liberated, and powerful in her own body - something she had not experienced since before her experiences of violence. She hosted a post performance community dialogue and learned of the transformative power of the witness. From the moment Nana offered her first performance ritual in July, she knew that she needed to share her process with youth like her, to turn their trauma into power and reclaim their narratives for their own healing and liberation. 

“I am super excited to launch our Black Abundance Festival, celebrating the healing and liberation work our communities participate in daily! We have come so far in our healing over the last few years and we deserve a moment to celebrate!”