Bria Bacon

Spring 2026 Space Grant Resident Artist

Bria Bacon (she/her) is a full-time performing artist and embodied movement scientist working predominantly within the frame of dance, while curious and gifted in theater, writing, storytelling, activism, science, sound-making, and singing. Born and raised on Lenapehoking lands (commonly known as New Jersey), she attended Union County Academy for Performing Arts high school, and later, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. While completing her BFA in Dance, she was accepted into the Graduate School of Education. Although she did not pursue that pedagogical path, she had time to seed and foster multiplicities within through varied coursework: Black women writers and their texts, queer texts, creative writing practices, feminism, art history, natural sciences, behavior and psychology. Since then, she has been in dialogue with a physical, natural, and spiritual practice of transformation, memory, and autonomy. The tangible body and notions of the borrowed body help discover and display the dance (or the science) of the individual. Simply put, she remains curious around the belief that the body informs definitions and defines information.

Whilst in school and upon graduating, Bacon has had the pleasure of learning from and performing with a range of creators and thoughtful humans that have offered invaluable information around the environments she is looking to cultivate inside her own work. Compositional experiences with Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili + Peter Born), Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, Saidiya Hartman and Sarah Benson, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Stephen Petronio, Niall Jones, Bebe Miller, and ChameckiLerner have introduced her to languages/pedagogies/approaches that bring about the simultaneous explosiveness, simplicity, and resbit that allow her to recover liberation and maintain honesty inside presentation. As a descendant of the West African diaspora, North American indigenous peoples, foreign whites, radical femmes and courageous lesbians, it is her inheritance to take up space with alternative/creative logic, intention, and rest. All praise to the angels, ancestors, and folx throughout her village.

Photo by Maria Baranova

IG: @briabacon