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Centering the Artist Series presents Weathering the Body: Cultural Memory, Burnout, and Building Sustainable Black Dance Futures

Thursday, May 7, 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM (EDT)
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Centering the Artist is Dance/USA's public learning series, which advances well-being in the arts through artist-driven dialogue, reflection, and collective inquiry.

More About the Series: 
Continuing Dance/USA’s programming for and about independent artists, this series of critical conversations will bring together artists from diverse backgrounds to share and reflect on their journeys in dance, their artistic work, and their practice around wellness.  Guided by the artists’ experience and interests, these conversations center storytelling and invite deep listening and collective learning. Exploring these and other issues, this series of programs will offer a learning journey, with moderated and unmoderated conversations, opportunities for attendee participation, and curated readings. Thank you to the Wallace Foundation for their partnership in presenting this series in 2026. 

More About the Conversation: 

What does it mean to create dance as an act of cultural survival? And how do artists sustain themselves while holding history, trauma, community expectation, and institutional precarity in their bodies?
In this artist-led conversation, choreographer Kevin Lee-Y Green invites fellow independent artists into an inquiry around well-being as resistance. Grounded in his experiences creating socially engaged works and producing large-scale works in under-resourced contexts, this session explores the physical, emotional, financial, and spiritual toll of culturally urgent artmaking.
This will not be a lecture. It will be a structured conversation.
Together we will explore:
  • Burnout as a systemic issue, not a personal failure
  • The body as archive: carrying ancestral and community memory
  • Navigating grief, instability, and leadership fatigue
  • Wellness practices rooted in cultural specificity
  • Building sustainable ecosystems beyond extractive funding models
Participants will engage in reflective prompts, small breakout dialogue, and collective mapping of what “well-being” actually requires in their artistic lives. The session will close with practical strategies for boundary-setting, intergenerational collaboration, and redefining success outside institutional validation.
This conversation centers artists working at the intersections of race, geography, and limited resources — particularly those building work outside major metropolitan hubs. It invites deep listening, truth-telling, and shared imagination around artistic longevity.
Well-being is not indulgence. It is infrastructure.

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