Matthew Cumbie Dance Residency Artist Talk

Join Matthew Cumbie for an Artist Talk as part of his spring dance residency here at Salem State. Open to all. 

Matthew Cumbie (he/him/his) is a collaborative dancemaker, writer, and artist educator. His artistic research cultivates processes and experiences that are participatory and intergenerational, moving through known and unknown, and bring a poetic lens to a specifically queer experience. His choreography and dancemaking- considered “a blend of risk-taking with reliability, [and] a combination of uncertainty and wisdom,”- weaves together a physical vocabulary of momentum and clarity, revelatory moments, and a belief in a body’s capacity to meet each moment.

He has danced in the companies of Christian von Howard, Keith Thompson, Jill Sigman, Paloma McGregor, and Dance Exchange- an intergenerational dance organization founded by Liz Lerman- where he became an Associate Artistic Director and the Director of Programs and Communications. With Dance Exchange, he collaborated on and performed in works ranging in topic from the human genome to prayer and protest, on the highest point of the Great Smoky Mountains during a total solar eclipse, and with community organizers and activists after years of research and work in response to structures of racism and erasure in Dallas, Texas. He helped develop and brand Cassie Meador’s Moving Field Guide - a program created in partnership with the US Forest Service that connects artists with scientists, naturalists, and environmental educators to help people learn about environmental issues - and was an artist-educator with Jacob’s Pillow community engagement and Curriculum in Motion programs.

Currently, Matthew is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colby College. Among other projects, he sustains multi-year performance projects with collaborator Betsy Miller - in the form of an improvisational duet performance practice - and with collaborator Tom Truss. Together, Matthew and Tom are developing ReWritten, a multidisciplinary exploration of queerness, history, and the lives and writing of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Matthew also dances as a company member with Christopher K. Morgan & Artists, and is a certified practitioner of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. His work has been commissioned and supported by places like Dance Place, the Kennedy Center, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, and Harvard University, and by the National Endowment for the Arts, the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, HumanitiesDC, the Arcus Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Maine Arts Commission. He has been on faculty at Texas Woman’s University, Queensborough Community College, American University, and the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, and has been an invited speaker at the New York City Roundtable Arts in Education conference, the Advancing the Human Condition Symposium at Virginia Tech, and the LGBT Health and Art Making conference, in partnership with the Human Rights Commission and the GWU Health and Well-being graduate program. Originally from Houston, Matthew holds undergraduate degrees from Texas Lutheran University and Texas State University and an MFA in dance from Texas Woman’s University.