Kayla Hamilton

Fellow 2023
performance maker, dancer, educator cultural consultant and artistic director from New York City
cooperating partner: Kinetic Light (Los Altos, USA)

Kayla Hamilton is a Texas born, Bronx (NYC) based performance maker, dancer, educator, cultural consultant, and the artistic director of K.Hamilton Projects. Her work aims to build an embodied and collective movement that uplifts the lives, stories and creations of Black Disabled people. Kayla has co-developed Crip Movement Lab with fellow Disabled artist, Elisabeth Motley – a pedagogical framework centering cross-disability accessible movement practices that are open to every-body. She is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and currently developing a new evening length performance How to Bend Down How to Pick It Up.

During her fellowship, Kayla will cooperate with the internationally-recognized Disability Arts Ensemble Kinetic Light, Los Altos (USA). Working in the disciplines of communications, technology, design, and dance, Kinetic Light creates and teaches at the nexus of access, queerness, disability, dance, and race. Cooperating with Kinetic Light, Kayla aims at expanding her knowledge in design, organization and tech based possibilities of dance. Both as a sight impaired dancer and dance lover, she wants to experience the vibrant multiplicity of the often times sight-centered (performance) world. To give Kayla the space to test and deepen her ideas about dance, Kinetic Light will provide her with insights and learnings in access research, culture, and technology, as well as production, and communications.

"Kayla’s choreographic work is standing out by the way she is creating aesthetic experiences through Audio Description – and, thus, expanding the boundaries of dance beyond the visual. Her choice to spend her fellowship with disabled-led ensemble Kinetic Light is an exciting partnership. This cooperation will be a great opportunity for Kayla to develop her art by further exploring and unpacking the potentialities of Audio Description as an aesthetic experience and expressive space of community and communication."
- Jury Statement