Brianna López
is a NYC-based dance artist.
I have been dancing for as long as I have known myself. My father taught me how. He is from Colombia, and dancing was the way he introduced me to rhythm, to music, to the body as something that already knows. Long before I understood instruction, he was teaching me.
My first memory is of standing on his feet, my hands curled around his pinkies as he stepped forward and back, carrying me with him. I like to think I wasn’t speaking yet—that my body learned before language did. He taught me salsa and merengue. I was the follower. I was addicted.
I grew up dancing with my family—at gatherings where music filled the room and movement meant belonging. I danced with aunts and uncles until my body gave out, falling asleep wherever I landed, in the middle of the party. Dancing until I could not anymore. That rhythm has never left me. It is how I understand life now: movement lives through me, or there is no life at all.
I learned early how to live between places. I cannot count how many elementary schools I attended; the geography of my childhood is a blur. Homes were provisional. Friendships brief. I learned how to arrive without force, how to listen before acting, how to feel my way into unfamiliar rooms. That education still lives in my body.
My work inhabits these in-between spaces—not as absence, but as ground. I live between softness and speed, in the folds of weight and release, in the negotiation between urgency and stillness. I am drawn to sensation as architecture: how one moment unfolds into the next, how the body responds to itself, to others, to the world it inhabits. I attend to texture, rhythm, and effort, to the quiet shifts that carry intention. Each motion holds a paradox—firmness in vulnerability, clarity in surrender, energy in quietude.
There is reverence here: for the senses, for what cannot be named, for the poetry of the ordinary. This is a practice of noticing, of breath, of availability. To enter it is to arrive fully in the body, to feel gravity and freedom at once, to let the body and heart speak together. This is where I reside.