d. Sabela grimes

d. Sabela grimes is a choreographer, transmedia storyteller, writer, composer, costume designer, and educator who builds improvisational and collaborative ecologies as frameworks for creative research and performance. His practice invests in the poetics of assemblage, matters of mutability, and the magic of misuse, braiding fluid systems of sound, movement, and image into shifting worlds of meaning.

He works closely with experimental video and movement artist, Meena Murugesan, to invent graphic symbolic systems that inspire sound design, visual content, and generate movement scores. Their current collaborative endeavor, Parable of Portals, is a modular, multidisciplinary constellation of live performances, immersive installations, short films, and participatory community activations. The project reimagines Octavia E. Butler’s personal writings, journals, and unfinished manuscripts as a living testament to the Parable novels’ exploration of survival, resilience, and communal becoming.

Black and Afro-diasporic vernacular, hip hop, street, and social dance traditions are central to his creative practice and pedagogy. As a faculty member at USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, he teaches courses in dance composition, hip hop and street dance histories, African and Afro-diasporic dance traditions, fashion and materiality, and his original movement system, Funkamental MediKinetics.

His research engages embodied theory, speculative practice, and Black cultural epistemologies. As a visual artist, he translates improvisational dance into visual environments using techniques such as digital collage and movement-responsive animation. He actively mentors students working across choreography, sound design, and emerging technologies, and shares pedagogical strategies that position generative AI as a dialogic tool for reflexive writing and interdisciplinary synthesis.

He is a 2023 USC Associates Award for Artistic Expression recipient, a 2021 Bessie Award recipient for Outstanding Performer, a 2017 County of Los Angeles Performing Arts Fellow, and a 2014 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow. He loves pancakes, speculative fiction, and his kinfolk.