I approach dance-making as a practice of curiosity, critical engagement, and community. Working as a dancer, choreographer, and educator, I create from lived experience, embodied research, and a commitment to cultural specificity. As a first-generation Palestinian American living in the diaspora, I use dance as a way to resist erasure, reclaim narrative, and affirm presence, allowing multiple truths—and contradictions—to coexist within the body and the work.

I generate movement through improvisation, task-based scores, repetition, and collaborative inquiry, drawing from modern and contemporary dance forms alongside Arab dance forms. These lineages inform how I work with rhythm, gesture, athleticism, and spatial pathways, shaping dances that unfold through accumulation and relation rather than spectacle. I often expand the choreographic frame through interdisciplinary elements such as installation, film, and set design, creating layered environments where movement exists in dialogue with other mediums and offers multiple points of entry for audiences.

In the studio, I cultivate collaborative processes where dancers actively shape the evolution of the work. I guide rehearsals through structured improvisations, prescribed material, and critical dialogue, listening closely to the body, the room, and the group. I value risk-taking and treat failure as generative, balancing rigor with play so that movement emerges through shared authorship and sustained attention.

I work within the concert dance world while remaining critical of its histories, hierarchies, and exclusions. I claim this space as a radical site for humanizing Palestinians—where Palestinian bodies onstage can exist beyond abstraction, stereotype, or orientalist framing. By foregrounding tenderness, endurance, grief, and collective presence, my work resists the conditions that render Palestinian life illegible and instead insists on complexity, dignity, and humanity. Through choreography, I aim to create dances that function as acts of resistance, remembrance, and survival, while inviting audiences to move closer to difficult truths and to one another.

view Olivia’s CV here.