Biography
Gabriela S. Grant is a quirky, introspective interdisciplinary creative artist that is based in Los Angeles, California. Grant explores what it means to “be still” through her art, and to better understand her human being-ness beyond her ego and earthly aspects of her identity such as race, sexual orientation, gender, etc. Her main modes of creative expression are movement, acting, and writing. She is inspired by various mediums to produce her work such as fashion, music, make-up, language, photography and more. She found her passion for art at the age of 3 in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where her mother put her in dance classes at Artistic Dance Academy where she studied Ballet, Jazz, Tap, Hip Hop, Lyrical, and Contemporary forms under Cindy King, Kahina Haynes, Mark Orsborn, Dominique Stewart, and Cierra Williams to name a few.
In 2016, Grant began her college career in Letters and Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) in an effort to take a step back from dance and explore what other fields had to offer. It was her training with Phunktions Hip Hop Dance Team, the JaM Youth Project, and a dance class with Sarah Beth Oppenheim that made her fall in love with dance again and declare it as her primary major. While studying dance at UMD, Grant trained and studied with Alvin Mayes, Adriane Fang, Maura Keefe, and Crystal Davis to name a few. She had the opportunity to perform in works created by Kendra Portier and Ronya-Lee Anderson, and learn in residencies from Monica Bill Barnes and Company and Cynthia Oliver. After just one year as a major, Grant was awarded the Creative and Performing Arts Scholarship which granted her full tuition for her final year and a half of her studies. Outside of her university studies, Grant attended the 2018 American Dance Festival where she performed the work of Abby Zbikowski and The New Utility and trained with Nia Love and Sara Proccupio, studied in Sidra Bell’s 2019 Winter MODULE, completed the very first Black Vernacular Dance Forms Virtual Intensive at The School at Jacob’s Pillow under the direction of Ephrat Asherie and Archie Burnett, and trained and performed in hip hop with Culture Shock DC and Laura Edwards Dance Company.
While at UMD, Grant was a student of the Honors Humanities Honors College (HoHum), where she redesigned a series of social justice workshops that she was trained to facilitate as a Justice Fellow in Operation Understanding DC. These workshops used dance as the primary tool of communication and was awarded the Honorable Mention Lowell Ensel Keystone Prize for her work. This challenged her to further develop this into a second major that she designed through the university’s Individualized Studies Program. Grant’s second major titled “Social Change Through Dance”, is an interdisciplinary major that looks at dance as a transformative tool for at-risk youth through three focus areas: dance education and creativity, challenges facing minority youth culture, and leadership for social change. With this degree, her primary goal is to create an arts space that offers free dance and social justice education to at-risk youth in economically disadvantaged communities.
Currently in Los Angeles, Gabriela S. Grant is working on developing her artistry through acting. She found her love for acting through her training at Identity School of Acting. Since 2022, she has been been training in the Advanced and Professional Tiers under Anthony Mark Barrow and Rebecca Reaney. She is also a Development Coordinator for Women’s Voices Now, a non-profit organization that advances girls’ and women’s rights globally through the power of film. Presently, Grant is focusing on producing work that reflects her diverse movement experiences and analyzes what it means to “be human”, while also working professional creative work in both the concert and commercial realms.
Artist Statement
My artistry is what I use to investigate who I am as a human being - how I can be present and “still”. Art is how I research my life’s journey. I make and hold space for the spiritual essence of who I am to exist and connect to my artistry from movement and acting mediums. My choreography incorporates my human being-ness while inviting others into my human experience and relationship to the surrounding world. It is often unknowing, but not confused, thus making space for destruction, evolution, and therefore newness; mirroring the evolution of my human self.
To make and allow space for my work, I intentionally remove the ego from my creative process. I open my spirit to absolute presence and awareness in order to hear what my most authentic self is telling me to create. It is simple yet complex, as I challenge myself to remove social conditioning, society, and “right” versus “wrong” from the process. I create work to “unsee” and redefine what I have been conditioned to identify; creating something for what it truly is and the life it contains. My hope is to navigate people away from “dance” as they know it and towards how they can relate to it as humans.
