MILVIA PACHECO SALVATIERRA

I am an Afro Latina artist born in Caracas, Venezuela where I began my career as a performer combining dance and theater training. Early experiences with trauma fueled a pressing drive toward movement. My first brush with the power of movement as a catalyst for healing came at age 13 during a theater arts project geared toward inner-city youth. By the time I was 18, I was certain that healing through movement was my calling. I devoted the next years of my life to achieving liberation (physical, emotional, intellectual, psychological) through art and movement. In this Journey, I have become a performer, choreographer, bodyworker, painter, poet, mother, and Community Organizer. My mission is to be a conduit for empowering myself, my family, and my community. Rather than being a victim of the past, I continue to deepen the connection with my history and my ancestral roots to facilitate a process of healing, and further, to help the Afro-descendant community find sustainable ways to share who we are and reclaim equity in our social structure. MÁS (Movimiento Afrolatino Seattle) has become the platform where I am able to actualize and continue this empowerment work both as an artist and an organizer.

Since I arrived in Seattle in 2012, I have had a wealth of experiences that have led me to deepen my understanding of my positionality in the world as a black and immigrant woman from Latin America. One of the most important experiences that I have had and that has opened the door to deepen that understanding is Monica Rojas’ invitation to be part of the De Inga y Mandiga show at Langston Hughes in 2014. Participating in the De Inga y Mandiga show marked the beginning of a profound work of healing the wounds caused by the processes of racialization. In that first experience, I embodied a character who taught me about my black heritage and the Afro and indigenous alliances throughout Latin America, through theater, music, and dance. It also taught me that Afro-descendant women are much more than what those racialization processes impose on us. The character of La Negra Lorenza said: “I am what I am” and that statement, simple as it may seem, helped close a deep crack of pain and pushed me to continue searching for tools to help dismantle structural racism and inspired the work of creating empowering spaces for the black voices of our communities. That is why I accepted without a doubt the invitation to continue collaborating in the creation of DIYM 2022. To give continuity to that healing process and to continue enjoying and sharing the deep joy generated by the sound of the drums and our traditions.

NAOMI MACALALAD BRAGIN

Naomi Macalalad Bragin is a transdisciplinary movement artist and writer interested in forming collaborations oriented toward solidarity and expansive dreaming.

With artist and community organizer Milvia Pacheco Salvatierra, she serves as co-artistic director of Seattle-based performance group Little Brown Language. Read about our current project Grief Rituals here.

Her first book Kinethic California: Dancing Funk & Disco Kinships (2024) tells stories of streetdances created by youth living in 1970s California whose everyday artistry helped set foundations for global contemporary hip hop dance. Kinethic California is winner of the 2025 Errol Hill Prize in African American performance studies and available as an open e-book at University of Michigan Press. Her dance writing has also been published in The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Tropics of Meta, the Oxford Handbooks of Hip Hop Dance and Screendance Studies, and Afrikadaa Magazine, and has won the Gerald Kahan Scholar Prize of American Society for Theatre Research and Outstanding Dance Publication of Congress on Research in Dance.

From 2002-2008 she directed DREAM, a nationally-touring streetdance company sponsored by Oakland’s Destiny Arts Center. She was a NYC Hip Hop Theater Festival Future Aesthetics Artist and received support from Creative Work Fund, East Bay Community Foundation, Zellerbach Foundation, Rennie Harris PureMovement and People United for a Better Oakland. Full Circle, DREAM’s collaboration with Cuban b-boy and folklorist José Francisco Barroso, explored cultural syncretisms in hip hop and Afro-Cuban rumba, nominated for the Isadora Duncan Dance Award. She danced in the streets as a member of Emma Said Dance Collective, doing de-escalation movement work during the WTO protests. Her artistic process is deeply informed by three-decades study of African Diaspora dances in the US, Cuba, Brazil and Europe, and underground dancing in clubs and parties of 1990s Los Angeles and New York.

Find her work as associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell here.

EMMY SMITH-STEWART

Emmy Smith-Stewart + Jeffrey Azevedo are a Seattle-based duo who have been weaving text, dance and video to create installations and performances for the past sixteen years. They are currently developing The Unicorn Crosses the Stream, which will premiere at Theater of Jackson on January 29th ’27.

JEFFREY AZEVEDO

Emmy Smith-Stewart + Jeffrey Azevedo are a Seattle-based duo who have been weaving text, dance and video to create installations and performances for the past sixteen years. They are currently developing The Unicorn Crosses the Stream, which will premiere at Theater of Jackson on January 29th ’27.