Bhumi B Patel is a queer, desi artist/activist, choreographer, dance writer/scholar, and director of pateldanceworks (she/they). In its purest form, her performance work is a love letter to her ancestors. Patel pursues liberation through dancing, choreographing, curating, educating, and writing/scholarship. Patel aims to support marginalized and oppressed voices through performance and movement education. While Patel has trained in Western forms, she seeks to create movement outside of white models of dance through use of improvisational practices and tapping into kinesthetic processing.

She earned her MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University and her MFA in Dance from Mills College. Bhumi is currently a doctoral student at The Ohio State University. She is a member of Dancing Around Race, and engages with curatorial practices for both performances and written publications. From 2017 to 2019, she curated “fem(me),” a performance of radical queers. In Winter and Spring 2022, she guest edited for Dancers’ Group’s InDance.

Patel’s work has been presented at CounterPulse, Joe Goode Annex, RoundAntennae, SAFEhouse Arts, max10, Summer Performance Festival, RAWdance's Concept Series, The San Francisco International Arts Festival, Berkeley Finnish Hall, PUSHfest, Shawl-Anderson’s Queering Dance Festival, and Deborah Slater’s Studio 210 Residency.

Bhumi was a 2017-2018 Lead Artist with SAFEhouse Arts, a 2017-2018 Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow and a 2019 Women of Color in the Arts Leadership through Mentorship Fellow. She has presented her research at the Dance Studies Association Annual conference and the Popular Culture Association Annual conference as well as having been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance.

photo by Douglas Calalo Berry