Grisha Coleman

As an artist and scholar, Grisha Coleman works in areas of movement, digital media, and performance that engage creative forms in choreography, music composition, and human-centered computer interaction. She is a joint professor in Theatre and Art and Design at the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern.

Coleman’s research explores relationships among physiological, technological, and ecological systems and human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. Her fellowship project, “The Movement Undercommons,” reimagines the use of new mobile motion-capture technology to build a data repository of vernacular movement portraits that center on cocreating critical and often overlooked narratives emergent of movement patterns through animate, sonic, and sculptural treatment of movement data.

Coleman earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been supported by Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Pioneer Works, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Stanford University’s Mohr Visiting Artist program, and the Surdna Foundation. She was previously a dancer with the acclaimed company Urban Bush Women and subsequently founded the music performance group Hot Mouth, which toured internationally and was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience. She was also an associate professor of movement, computation, and digital media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University, with affiliations in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre, the Design School, and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society.