Charli Brissey is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and teacher who works choreographically with various technologies and materials. This primarily includes bodies, cameras, objects, genders, instincts, language, and ecosystems. They are invested in movement practices to illuminate the role of the nonhuman in formation-practices of self and material environment, and turn to interspecies ecologies to challenge distinctions between nature and culture. Their live performances and video work have been presented in various galleries, conferences, film festivals, and performance venues nationally and internationally. This includes the National Queer Arts Festival (San Francisco, US), Movement Research at Judson Church (NYC, US), The Eye Film Institute (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center (NYC, US), Center for Performance Research (NYC, US), Vancouver Queer Film Festival (Vancouver, BC), Zurich Moves! Dance Festival (Zurich, Switzerland), Paris International Feminist Film Festival (Paris, France), The Arts in Society Conference (Budapest, Hungary), Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (Seattle, US), Queer Publics Symposium (Urbana, US), International Conference on the Image (Berkeley, CA), and several others. Brissey’s work has been funded through various University grants as well as Yellowhouse NYC, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship, Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. They received a BFA in Dance & Choreography and an MFA in Kinetic Imaging from Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as a second MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Brissey is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at the University of Michigan.

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I am currently work on an interdisciplinary multi-year study exploring the choreography of oceans and benthic ecosystems as potentially radical sites to inform how we move through our precarious terrestrial future. This research is emerging through intersections of dance, science and technology studies, and queer/feminist theory. Thus far it has resulted in two performance projects, Agua Viva in 2019 and Future Fish in 2022, with one final performance slated to premiere in 2023. 

As an extension of this project I am also developing a book manuscript titled Dance We Must: Choreographies of Time and Uncertainty. Weaving theory, speculative fabulation, personal anecdote, and science fiction, this experimental text moves between various sites, forms, and structures to examine our relationships to material environments in our current political-ecological climate. It centers dance and choreography as invaluable methodologies to research social, political, technological, and environmental phenomena.