Brianna López is a dance artist, educator, and researcher 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 Modern Dance from the University of Utah. Her practice navigates the intersection of choreography, pedagogy, and research, often in conversation with improvisation and technique.

Her ongoing creative research, the Naftali Method, is an improvisational practice rooted in speed and softness. It offers tools to generate individual movement language and cultivate collaborative connections. The method was piloted at ConnectArte Espacio Multidisciplinario in Tijuana under the working titles Soft as a Cat, Quick as a Bird and Playground Series. It has since been taught at San Diego Dance Theatre’s Summer Intensive, Movement and Dance Weekend at Nazareth University, and is now offered regularly in New York City at Kestrels. The next phase of this research will expand to include contact improvisation as a compositional tool.

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 1 charter school, teaching over 260 K–3 students and culminating in school-wide and city-wide performances.

Her choreographic work spans the U.S., Mexico, and Israel. In 2025, 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. Her solo Gentleness premiered at the P3 Summer Intensive in Tel Aviv and was later performed at SDSU and Nazareth University. Across all her work, Brianna pursues a deepening dialogue between internal landscapes and collective movement structures.

She continues to develop her research and choreographic work while training at Gibney, Movement Research, and the Mark Morris Dance Center, as well as in contact improvisation communities throughout New York City