Meet our Team!
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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!”
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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!”