Jen is a multidisciplinary movement educator and artist, grounded in somatic practice and process. She creates inclusive and exploratory spaces to instigate shifts in awareness, perspective, and pattern through embodied experiences. Using innovative and unconventional approaches, she promotes curiosity, investigation, and connection to manifest understanding and growth. Continue Reading >
Teaching philosophy
I prefer not to think of myself as a teacher. I am a facilitator, a guide, a space-holder, a specialist, and a lead investigator, but I don’t believe I teach anything. I invite people into spaces, into their bodies and into their awareness, I share ideas and instigate possibilities, I ask questions and introduce obstacles, I offer a mirror and I help to focus a lens, and the experience becomes the teacher. Learning is a very personal process, unique in timing and trajectory for each individual, continual over the course of our lives, and amplified within a sense of community. My work is in creating and holding this space, to offer students support, guidance, and challenges as they deepen inward and expand outward, and encourage them as they explore, fail, persist, and grow. Continue Reading >
Artist Statement
As unique and individual as our lives may seem, they all share a much larger story, rooted in our relationships and lived experiences. This place of shared space is where my work begins.
My dances find their way into existence through a process of unfolding, initiated by a point of inquiry, and informed by the experiences of myself and my collaborators. We then follow whatever presents itself, in pursuit of discovering, of unearthing, of instigating movement rather than dictating it – of arriving at a new place of understanding through the creative process rather than manifesting a predetermined idea. And it is this new understanding, or the process of finding it, that becomes the dance. Continue Reading >
testimonials
Jen uses a wide variety of teaching tools and embodied experiences that left me with a deeper understanding of movement and of myself.
BFA Dance Major, The Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University
Jen is a warm, engaging, intelligent and delightful person who is able to balance the personal and professional, the needs of self and other, and engage in the process of growth and discovery with an open heart and mind. Her ability to frame, share and teach complex material in a way that engages students is exemplary.
Cat Maguire, Wholemovement member / LIMS faculty
Some teachers train their students to be the ‘factory workers’ of the dance community, training only bodies to fill a role… But Jen creates truly thinking, moving, dancing artists, ready for life.
Dr. Rima Faber, Dance Educator, NDEO
jen graham 