mayfield brooks Residency

In their recent work Whale Fall, the 2025–2026 CFA Artist in Residence mayfield brooks has been researching whales and the ways in which they move as  a collective through their watery worlds, sing to each other, grieve the death of their children, and feed new ecologies deep in the oceans when they die (through a process known as “whale fall.”) Over the course the 2025–2026 academic year, brooks will work closely with the CFA as they complete this series and begin a new project on the interconnectedness of shorelines through legacies of colonial extraction and ecological decay, as well as practices of rest and renewal. In this new work, ocean tides, waves, and shorelines are inspiration for how we dance together and apart. What is the body’s shoreline like? How can different ecologies of cellular integration emerge through voice, sound, and movement? Embracing practices and politics of grief, loss, and decomposition, brooks uses dance and movement to explore the entangled relations of human and non-human worlds.

A full schedule of residency events will be shared in the summer of 2025. Student, faculty, staff, and community members interested in learning more about brooks’ residency are welcome to reach out directly to Joshua Lubin-Levy at jlubinlevy@wesleyan.edu.

mayfield brooks improvises while Black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film Whale Fall; a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist; and recent Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. brooks received a BA from Trinity College, an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and an MFA from the University of California, Davis. They also studied somatics and social change at the Moving on Center School for Participatory Arts and Somatic Research, and contemporary dance at the School for New Dance Development in the Netherlands. mayfield brooks thanks their human and nonhuman ancestors for watching over them and protecting them.

View past events as part of this residency. 

Image: mayfield brooks, "Sensoria: An Opera Strange," June 2022, Danspace Project. Photo by Ian Douglas, courtesy of Danspace Project.