Power in Movement

Power in Movement: Explore healing, joy, and resilience through guided movement, reflection, and community connection.
About this Event

This is a free event and open to all. If you would like to support our work, optional donations can be made via Venmo or Cash App.

About the "Learn. Connect. Build Community" Series

This series is designed to create an ongoing space where research and community knowledge meet—centering Black voices, lived experiences, and pathways toward healing, resilience, and collective care. Across events, our goal is to make research more accessible, foster dialogue, and build meaningful connections between researchers and the communities we serve.

This event, Power in Movement, invites participants into a community-centered exploration of movement as a source of healing, expression, and collective resilience. Together, we will reflect on how movement can hold memory, release tension, build connection, and create space for joy and restoration within Black communities. Through guided movement, storytelling, and conversation, the event will center embodiment as both a personal and communal practice of care.

The session will be led by Akoiya Harris (she/her), a Seattle-based movement artist whose work uses a queer Black gaze to explore the interweaving of communal and personal stories through dance. Akoiya has collected oral histories for Wa Na Wari’s Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute and Black Collectivity, and has participated in the Black Embodiments Studio Arts Writing Incubator. Her choreography has been presented at the Seattle Art Museum, Wa Na Wari, On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, The Moore Theater, and more. She is a founding member of Black Collectivity, a group that explores memory and culture through embodied responses, and continues a matriarchal lineage of teaching through her work with youth at Ailey Camp and Pacific Northwest Ballet.

This is a free event and open to all. If you would like to support our work, optional donations can be made via Venmo or Cash App. Contributions directly support the sustainability of our community- and culture-centered research. Specifically, they help fund community engagement efforts such as future public events, partnerships with local organizations, and the creation of accessible research materials. Funds also support fair compensation for research participants, whose time, knowledge, and lived experiences are essential to advancing this work. By contributing, attendees help build a more equitable and community-centered model of research.