Angela's Pulse

Angela’s Pulse creates and produces collaborative performance work dedicated to building community and illuminating bold new stories. Angela's Pulse provides a home for interdisciplinary collaborations that thrive on both politics and play, and is committed to developing timely performance works that provoke, inform, and inspire. Co-founded in 2008 by Paloma and Patricia McGregor, Angela’s Pulse was named for their mother Angela, an artist, teacher and activist who continues to inspire their work. 

Angela’s Pulse is a Black-led, artist-led organization. Their leadership in the field includes their core community-building initiatives Dancing While Black, Building a Better Fishtrap, and the newly formed North Star Arts Incubator, a cohort of nine artist-activists who are visioning moving the field beyond “diversity, equity and inclusion” and toward liberation. 

Over the course of a decade, the New York-based organization has produced performance work by dozens of artists from New Orleans to the Bronx, supported 22 emerging Black dancemakers through their Dancing While Black fellowship program, and published a landmark digital journal dedicated to the voices of Black experimenters. 

In a system and field that emphasizes end-products and individualism, Angela’s Pulse focuses instead on process, developing relationships that create and connect communities over time. They have worked in deep partnership and collaboration with values-aligned organizations, including BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, PURPOSE Productions, and New Orleans-based Junebug Productions. 

Paloma McGregor (b. 1974) is a Caribbean-born, New York-based choreographer and arts leader. As co-founder and Artistic Director of Angela’s Pulse, McGregor has spent more than a decade centering Black voices through collaborative, “community-specific” performance projects. A former newspaper editor, McGregor brings a choreographer’s craft, a journalist’s urgency, and a community organizer’s framework in the service of big visions. The daughter of a fisherman and public school art teacher, McGregor amplifies and remixes the quotidian choreographies of Black folks, reactivating them in often-embattled public spaces. McGregor’s work situates performers and witnesses at the embodied intersection of the ancestral past and an envisioned future; for her, tradition transcends time.

Working at the growing edge of her field, McGregor has been an inaugural recipient of several major awards, including: 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). Paloma was a 2013‐14 Artist In Residence at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a 2014-16 Artist In Residence at BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a 2016-18 New York Live Arts Live Feed Artist, and a 2018 Movement Research NYSCA Artist-in-Residence. She has been nominated for the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship and the Herb Alpert Award. Recent support for her work includes the Soros Arts Fellowship (2020) as well as grants from the New York Community Trust (Mosaic Fund) and  MAP Fund.

Paloma also facilitates technique, creative process and community engagement workshops around the world. She toured internationally for six years with Urban Bush Women and two years with Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange, and continues to perform in project‐based work, including Skeleton Architecture, an acclaimed collective of Black women(+) improvisers with whom she received a coveted New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for performance in 2017.

Alongside her choreographic work, McGregor founded Dancing While Black (DWB), a platform for community-building, intergenerational exchange and visibility among Black dance artists whose work, like hers, doesn’t fit neatly into boxes. Since 2012, DWB has produced more than two dozen public dialogues and performances, supported the development of 22 Black artists through the DWB Fellowship, and published the country’s first digital journal by and for Black experimental dance artists.
 

Photo Description: Ebony Noelle Golden and Sydnie L. Mosley (Barnard Alumna, '15-'16 DWB Fellow) share a moment of pure joy surrounded by a circle of Dancing While Black community members at Dancing While Black: This Body Knows Freedom - Story Circles on Organizing toward Vision in an Age of Resistance at NYU's Hemispheric Institute in November 2017. Photo by Whitney Browne.