Jessica Humphrey
MFA, MSME, CLMA
Jessica makes dances to study the profound potentials of human beings moving together, tending to space, time, and bodies. In particular, how the tenderness and vulnerability elicited by the creative process can deepen their relationship with themselves, each other, and the world. Her movement research began in childhood with gymnastics and continues with dancemaking from various, shifting perspectives, and states of body~mind. Her dances are expressions of her engagement with paradox, contemplative and somatic practices, Integral Theory, Practice-as-Research, and reverence for work of those within whose lineages she moves.
She has co-created several evening-length dances over the past 20 years with artists such as Deborah Hay, Sara Shelton Mann, Gabor Tompa, Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s La Postra Nostra, Leslie Seiters, LIVE, and throughout a 13-year collaboration with Eric Geiger that activated and tuned her aesthetic sensibilities.
She has a BFA in Dance from California State University, Long Beach (2002) and an MFA in Modern Dance with a focus on contact improvisation and creative process from the University of Utah (2008). Her thesis marked the beginning of her praxis of Nina Martin’s Continuum of Deliberation, a lifelong study in the studio and on stage of the what and how of choreographing our improvisations and improvising our choreography.
Jessica has practiced, performed, taught, and researched contact improvisation as both a dance technique and somatic practice for more than two decades, mostly in the US and Mexico. Teachers include Nancy Stark Smith, Marjean McKenna, Nina Martin, Martin Keogh, Keith Hennessy, Angie Hauser, Andrew Harwood, John Glenn, Jess Curtis, Ray Chung, and Chris Aiken.
Intensive study with Deborah Hay in 2009 changed her life and continues to inspire her every move.
In 2021, she initiated Portal, a transborder platform for somatic experiments in dancemaking and dance education. Born on Zoom during the pandemic and continuing to grow IRL on both sides of the US-Mexico border, she co-facilitates this evolving entity alongside Miroslava Wilson Montoya.
She is a Master Somatic Movement Educator (MSME) with the International Somatic Movement and Therapy Association (ISMETA) and is certified in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis through the Integrated Movement Studies Program (IMS, 2006) with primary teachers Peggy Hackney and Janice Meaden, Dance-Specific Pilates with Body Arts and Sciences, International (BASI, 2002) with Karen Clippinger and Rael Isocowitz, has studied Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®) with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Mary Lou Seereiter, and Amy Matthews, and has been in the BMC® Somatic Movement Educator Program at Moving Within since 2015. She has studied the Feldenkrais Method® by immersion through weekly practice with Seiters, Geiger, and Liam Clancy and received Functional Integration sessions from Kristen Baum Wilcox. Her Alexander Technique teachers include Marjean McKenna, Eileen Troberman, Luc Vanier, Elizabeth Johnson, and Shelley Senter.
A certification in Integral Facilitation® (Ten Directions, 2019) with Diane Musho Hamilton, Rob McNamara, Cindy Lou Golin, Gabriel Wilson and Rebecca Ejo Colwell informs her work in the studio, within institutions, and throughout the community. After experiencing the shadow dynamics of horizontal, non-hierarchical group structures, she pursued this training in facilitation, conflict as a creative process, and both top-down and bottom-up leadership techniques.
In her role as a Professor of Dance at SDSU, Jessica has worked with the Prison Arts Collective to bring arts education to incarcerated participants and continues to learn through teaching (dancemaking, contact improvisation, embodied anatomy, somatics, making dances with students and mentoring their dancemaking processes) and researching dancemaking that includes the primordial, classical, popular, and experimental.
