Paloma McGregor

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Paloma McGregor (Artistic Director, Angela’s Pulse) is a Caribbean-born, New York-based choreographer and cultural worker. A former newspaper reporter, she combines a choreographer’s craft, journalist’s urgency and anti-racist organizer’s framework to activate creative communities and shepherd collaborative visioning.

McGregor is currently developing A’we deh ya, a multi-year, interdisciplinary performance project that activates a choreographic call-and-response between the U.S. mainland and her homeland, St. Croix, a current U.S. colony at the frontlines of climate emergency. The first iteration, a dance film, has been screened at film festivals in the U.S. and internationally, and won Best Screendance Film award at the 2022 Denton Black Film Festival. A'we is the latest iteration of her project Building a Better Fishtrap, rooted in her father’s vanishing fishing tradition and three animating questions she’s asked since leaving her ancestral home: What do you take with you? Leave behind? Return to reclaim?

Working at the growing edge of her field, McGregor received a 2020 Soros Arts Fellowship for her choreographic work and has been an inaugural recipient of several major awards for her art-making and organizing, including: Artist Employment Program of Creatives Rebuild New York (2022); Mosaic Network & Fund (2020); Dance/USA’s Fellowship to Artists (2019); Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Institute Fellowship (2018); and Surdna Foundation’s Artists Engaging in Social Change (2015). In 2017, she won a “Bessie” Award for performance with skeleton architecture, a collective of Black women(+) improvisers.

In addition to her art-making, McGregor has spent more than a decade investing in the leadership of other Black dance artists through Dancing While Black (DWB), which she founded in 2012 as a platform for community-building, intergenerational exchange and visibility among Black dance artists whose work, like hers, doesn’t fit neatly into boxes. She does all this work as co-founder of Angela’s Pulse, which cultivates art-making as a means of community-building, activating vision and illuminating bold stories.