Artist Statement

I make ballets that tell the truth through beauty, emotional depth, and human connection. I return again and again to stories shaped by faith, womanhood, memory, longing, injustice, and survival because those are the places where movement carries what words cannot. I feel drawn to the hidden interior life of a person or community: what they carry, what they resist, what they remember, what they hope for. That is where choreography begins for me. I want the stage to hold not only beauty, but meaning. Not only refinement, but revelation.

As a Chicana artist of Mexican descent, I care deeply about creating work that expands what ballet can hold and whom it can honor. I love the rigor, architecture, and musicality of ballet, and I also want to push the form toward fuller stories, deeper feeling, and a wider range of human experience. I want to make space for women with agency and complexity, for cultural memory, for tenderness and strength to exist side by side. I want audiences to encounter something vivid and alive onstage, something that feels at once intimate and expansive.

One of the signatures of my work lies in the way I juxtapose the mass of the corps de ballet with the singular voice of one dancer. I return often to the tension between life at large and the ache, courage, or clarity of the individual. I love what happens when a stage filled with bodies can suddenly frame one person’s humanity with greater force, or when a single dancer can throw the meaning of the whole community into sharper relief. That relationship between the collective and the individual has become central to how I build emotional and theatrical meaning. I am interested in the way a chorus can embody history, pressure, memory, or society itself, while one body carries witness, interruption, defiance, prayer, or transformation.

Music anchors everything for me. I listen for structure, tension, breath, momentum, and rupture. I listen for where the score opens a door into emotion, character, and atmosphere. My movement language begins in classical ballet, but I stretch it toward whatever the story asks of it. I love precision, but I also love weight, texture, suspension, stillness, and surprise. I care about movement that feels inhabited from the inside out, movement that reveals a soul, not just a shape.

Collaboration stands at the center of my process. I build work with dancers, not simply on them. I want them to enter the world of a piece with curiosity, imagination, and emotional honesty. Together we search for movement that feels necessary, specific, and alive. I often begin with image, character, rhythm, or an emotional question: what grief does to the body, what devotion steadies, what love risks, what survival costs, what joy restores. Those questions lead me toward movement that feels deeply rooted and dramatically clear. I want the creative process to challenge dancers, nourish their artistry, and invite them into something fully felt.

I care deeply about making dances that reach people. I want audiences to feel drawn in, not kept at a distance. I want them to leave with an image they cannot shake, a feeling they did not expect, or a new tenderness toward someone else’s story, or even their own. Even when I explore difficult material, I look for light inside it: grace, resilience, wonder, transformation. I believe dance can confront pain and still offer beauty. I believe it can ask difficult questions and still leave room for hope.

At a time when so much performance vanishes almost as soon as it appears, I want to make ballets that linger. I want to make work with rigor, imagination, and emotional consequence. Work that gives dancers something rich to inhabit. Work that invites audiences into a fuller encounter with beauty and truth. Work that honors ballet’s power while opening new space within it. That is the work I am most excited to share.