CHOREOGRAPHY
MFA Thesis Research.
This page contains documentation created as part of my Candidacy for my MFA in Modern Dance and Graduate Screendance Certificate at the University of Utah. My research centers on exploring the role of the body in understanding the self through interdisciplinary, collaborative choreographic and pedagogical practices.
Below, you will find my Choreographic Thesis, which premiered in October 2025, entitled where we were | have been | will be, my Oral Defense, and my Literature Review. My Thesis Document will be included pending publication.
01
where we were| have been | will be
An interdisciplinary work directed by Soph Cardinal (they/them) in collaboration with their performers Grace Hurley, Terra Killpack-Knutsen, Salanieta Malohifo’ou, Keily Tafiti, and Em Zinn. This work serves as a culmination of their choreographic, scholarly, and performative research. Shifting boundaries between movement, film, sound score, and visual art, this piece invites the audience to reconcile their relationships to transformation, grief, and discomfort, to sit in the spaces in-between.
02
Oral Defense
This oral defense bridges theoretical frameworks of identity and gender with findings from my movement generation process, examining non-binary epistemologies in dance-making as a site for understanding selfhood through the body.
Its approval by my Committee marked my progression to the title of Master of Fine Arts.
03
Literature Review
This preliminary literature review engages the embodied philosophies of Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, and Omi Salas-SantaCruz to examine how centering the body in physical, emotional, and cultural contexts can deepen our understanding of selfhood and identity. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s notion of nepantla as a space of liminal transformation, Butler’s theory of gender performativity, and SantaCruz's articulation of decolonial trans* epistemologies, I explore how dance, particularly through trans and gender nonconforming experiences, becomes a site for interrogating and reimagining identity. This work situates dance-making as a critical praxis within decolonial pedagogy, foregrounding the body as a source of knowledge.