Brianna López is a teacher, choreographer, and performer from California, now based in New York City. She holds a B.A. in Dance from San Diego State University and an M.F.A. in Dance from the University of Utah. Her work explores the intersections of multitasking, effort, and agility to expand the body’s expressive range.

Her practice is rooted in years of training in Gaga and contact improvisation, as well as international experience in intensives and improvisation communities that continue to shape both her choreography and pedagogy. These experiences led to the creation of the naftali method, an improvisational dance practice that merges speed and softness into a single embodied experience. The method equips dancers with tools to cultivate their own movement language while nurturing a sustainable relationship to velocity and responsiveness. It has since been taught at San Diego Dance Theatre’s Summer Intensive, Movement and Dance Weekend at Nazareth University, Films that Move Residency, and is now offered as single master classes in NYC. Its next phase will integrate partnering, drawing from principles of contact improvisation.

As an educator, Brianna teaches technique and improvisation as a reciprocal flow—an ebb and return—between form and exploration. Her classes are physically demanding and rooted in curiosity, encouraging risk, responsiveness, and embodied decision-making. She has developed university-level courses, including Israeli Contemporary Dance, Physicalizing Feminism: Using the Creative Process to Embody Theory, and restructured the Introduction to Dance course. She also created a trimester-based, culturally responsive dance curriculum for a Title I charter school, teaching over 260 K-3 students and culminating in school-wide and city-wide performances. She now teaches 127 freshman dancers at MESA Charter High School, working within a culturally and demographically responsive program that includes communal and cultural dances as well as dance appreciation.

Her choreographic work spans the U.S., Mexico, and Israel. In 2024, she was commissioned by SISU Compañía de Danza to create an evening-length work, “Quietude,” for the Tránsito Festival at CECUT, also presented by Vanguard Culture in San Diego. She also premiered her solo, Gentleness, in Israel and toured to San Diego State University in California and Nazareth University in New York.

Her current focus is on further developing the naftali method through teaching, research, and somatic practices in New York City. She performs with ImPort Dance Sessions under the artistic direction of Michal Ben Lior, first in Israel (2022) and now in New York City. She continues her training at Gibney, Peridance, and at the local contact improvisation jams in Soho.