Boston Dancemakers Resident 2024-2025

Nailah Randall-Bellinger is a dancer, choreographer, scholar, educator, and founding artistic director of RootsUprising Dance Company based in Boston, MA. She has studied, performed, and lectured throughout the U.S. and abroad including Brazil, Ghana, Haiti, The Czech Republic, and Senegal. With a Masters Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies: Dance and African American literature from Lesley University, Randall-Bellinger’s choreographic work is rooted in interdisciplinary research, often drawing from literary and historical source materials. Randall-Bellinger trained with Jamie Nichols, Karen McDonald, Raymond Johnson, and Gerarld McCall in California, in modern, jazz, and ballet.  She began her professional performing career in Los Angeles, CA, where she was a performing member of contemporary dance companies: Karen McDonald’s New Age Dance Workshop and Jamie Nichols Fast Feet, Inc. 

Randall-Bellinger has been teaching modern and contemporary classes throughout the U.S. and abroad for over 35 years. She currently serves as Chair of the Dance Department at The Cambridge School of Weston, in Weston, MA, and is also Teaching Artist faculty at Harvard Dance Center at Harvard University. She has taught at both institutions for over a decade. Randall-Bellinger was formerly Assistant Professor of Dance at Dean College in Franklin, MA.

In 2015, Randall-Bellinger collaborated with a group of artists in Cambridge to give voice to the voiceless in the production of Stories Without Roofs: Transitions, a show consisting of the essays, monologues, poetry, songs, dance and general musings of residents of shelters in the city of Cambridge. She has created original works for Boston-based contemporary dance company Urbanity and was choreographer for the Boston production Ragtime at Wheelock Family Theater. In 2017, her company RootsUprising performed at the Harvard’s Black in Design conference. In 2020, she was awarded the Alorie Parkhill Learning and Travel Grant to study expressions of dance, which will take her to Kenya in the summer of 2022. 

In Spring 2021, Randall-Bellinger facilitated the first of a series of virtual artist-led discussions around artistry, identity, and advocacy, where she presented her film works #shesstillbreathing and Women’s Work, both inspired and constructed within the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic. She was a collaborating choreographer for Movement Meditations, as part of the A.R.T.’s The Arboretum Experience. 

Randall-Bellinger was one of seven artists commissioned by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA) in 2021 to create a new work on campus, and which was developed through a residency at Harvard Dance Center. The work, titled Initiation– In Love Solidarity and performed by her company RootsUprising, explores the embodiment of the Middle Passage, and the resilience and evolving identities of women in the African diaspora. A site-specific, interdisciplinary, hybrid work, Initiation– In Love Solidarity exists as both a dance film and as a live, place-based performance. 

While in residence at Harvard Dance Center in the summer and fall of 2021, Randall-Bellinger was in direct dialogue with a range of Harvard scholars and fellows and the work was presented in various modalities across campus alongside robust public discussions. In March 2022, Initiation– In love Solidarity was presented by the Cambridge Arts Council and will be included in Harvard’s Presidential Initiative on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery digital archive and walking tour, to be published in spring 2022.  In 2023 Randall-Bellinger created  the dance narrative set for film, Who We Say We Are,  for the city of Cambridge, with the support of NEFA and the Cambridge Arts Council residency grant. Most recently, in honor of the historical figure Zipporah, Randall-Bellinger presented her biographical dance narrative, Zipporah, at the Going to Ground  collaborative site specific project at the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

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Project Statement

Through a multimodal dance narrative, (just) 33 is an examination of the life of the incredible performing artist, Donny Edward Hathaway. While he is considered one of the most influential musicians of the R&B and soul genres, he struggled with schizophrenia during the last years of his life, which led to his suicidal death at the age of 33.

“I want to develop a choreographic work that utilizes the body of Donny Hathaway’s work and archival documentation — recorded interviews, music, photographs, and other documents — to explore the intersection of artistic expression and mental health, and also to celebrate the breadth and genius of this under-recognized artist. Were his mental struggles reflected in his creative work? Did he use his creative work as a way to deal with his mental struggles? Or did his mental struggles disrupt his creativity? Using an ensemble of both male and female identifying dancers I want to explore these questions. They will serve as a foundation for examining Donny Hathaway’s life and the relationship between creativity and mental health.”