Jasmine Hearn is a Bronx based choreographer, performer, and dancer. A native Houstonian, she graduated magna cum laude from Point Park University with her B.A. in Dance. Jasmine travels around the world to showcase her choreographic work and to participate in multidisciplinary collaborations. Receiving a 2017 Bessies Award for her performance as part of the Skeleton Architecture, she is currently a collaborator with Alisha B. Wormsley, David Dorfman Dance, and Tara Aisha Willis.
My Vocation
A choreographer and performer who uses dance and sound, I have been investigating how the body is able to use memory, sensation, and imagination as ways to enter embodied practices to articulate story, ancestry, and personal truth. I am asking, how can the body act as a bridge that connects community with her-story/his-story. Over the past six years working as a freelance performer, I have had many opportunities to engage with community— teaching dance technique and movement classes, facilitating improvisational scores for movement exploration, and producing intimate, immersive performance experiences. I am committed in the facilitation of an environment that gives space for folks to connect with their fantasy and feeling.
My Story
I entered my dance practice very young improvising to my favorite songs. And I started my "formal" training at the Houston Ballet Academy later continuing at the Houston Metropolitan Dance Center and Episcopal High School under the direction of Evelyn Ireton and Frank Vega. An intern with the Houston Met Professional Dance Company during my senior year of high school, I also entered a mentoring relationship with dance artist and choreographer, jhon r. stronks. Since graduating Point Park, I have had the wonderful opportunity to have had an extensive performance career in Pittsburgh, PA. I started as a company member with the, now no longer, Dance Alloy Theater, and then as a core collaborator with the STAYCEE PEARL dance project. Other folks I have had a chance to work with include: Attack Theater, Gia T. Cacalano, the Pillow Project, and the August Wilson Dance Ensemble. During this time, I also began to share self-made solos that root in dance and performance theater with communities in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas.
I began making these solos as responses to personal experiences and current events. if god left the lights on could we walk alone in the dark, my response to street harassment and societal constructs of femininity, has premiered in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, NYC, and Houston. The piece, described as “a beautiful frustration of gender roles and our own collusion with the cages they create” (HoustonPress 2013), was the beginning of my choreographic career. I participated in the newMoves Emerging Choreographers Festival in 2010 and 2012 and continued to share my work with the Pittsburgh at summer festivals and curated showcases. In 2013, I had the opportunity to direct, produce, and choreograph a summer dance series, that’s what she said-- site specific vignettes found in the Garfield and East Liberty neighborhoods. This project was funded by The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments’ Investing in Professional Artists: The Pittsburgh Region Artists Program. That summer at the Capital Fringe Festival an installment of that’s what she said was presented in Washington D.C.
In 2016, I made a solo titled CINDER that was made while I was an artist in residence at the Dance Source Houston's The BARN. This piece is the beginning of solo project, blue, sable, and burning. As a 2016 Movement Research Van Lier fellow, I was able to continue working on this project, which was also funded by The Pittsburgh Foundation with the Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Grant with a space donation from The Space Upstairs and the Braddock Carnegie Library. During this time I was also collaborating with choreographers and artists, Marjani Forte-Saunders, Kate Watson Wallace, Jennifer Meridian, Ayanah Moor, and Julien Prévieux, and working with my grandmother, Claudette Johnson and videographer, Paul Kruse to put together video series, MEMORY KEEP(H)ER.
My Vocation
A choreographer and performer who uses dance and sound, I have been investigating how the body is able to use memory, sensation, and imagination as ways to enter embodied practices to articulate story, ancestry, and personal truth. I am asking, how can the body act as a bridge that connects community with her-story/his-story. Over the past six years working as a freelance performer, I have had many opportunities to engage with community— teaching dance technique and movement classes, facilitating improvisational scores for movement exploration, and producing intimate, immersive performance experiences. I am committed in the facilitation of an environment that gives space for folks to connect with their fantasy and feeling.
My Story
I entered my dance practice very young improvising to my favorite songs. And I started my "formal" training at the Houston Ballet Academy later continuing at the Houston Metropolitan Dance Center and Episcopal High School under the direction of Evelyn Ireton and Frank Vega. An intern with the Houston Met Professional Dance Company during my senior year of high school, I also entered a mentoring relationship with dance artist and choreographer, jhon r. stronks. Since graduating Point Park, I have had the wonderful opportunity to have had an extensive performance career in Pittsburgh, PA. I started as a company member with the, now no longer, Dance Alloy Theater, and then as a core collaborator with the STAYCEE PEARL dance project. Other folks I have had a chance to work with include: Attack Theater, Gia T. Cacalano, the Pillow Project, and the August Wilson Dance Ensemble. During this time, I also began to share self-made solos that root in dance and performance theater with communities in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas.
I began making these solos as responses to personal experiences and current events. if god left the lights on could we walk alone in the dark, my response to street harassment and societal constructs of femininity, has premiered in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, NYC, and Houston. The piece, described as “a beautiful frustration of gender roles and our own collusion with the cages they create” (HoustonPress 2013), was the beginning of my choreographic career. I participated in the newMoves Emerging Choreographers Festival in 2010 and 2012 and continued to share my work with the Pittsburgh at summer festivals and curated showcases. In 2013, I had the opportunity to direct, produce, and choreograph a summer dance series, that’s what she said-- site specific vignettes found in the Garfield and East Liberty neighborhoods. This project was funded by The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments’ Investing in Professional Artists: The Pittsburgh Region Artists Program. That summer at the Capital Fringe Festival an installment of that’s what she said was presented in Washington D.C.
In 2016, I made a solo titled CINDER that was made while I was an artist in residence at the Dance Source Houston's The BARN. This piece is the beginning of solo project, blue, sable, and burning. As a 2016 Movement Research Van Lier fellow, I was able to continue working on this project, which was also funded by The Pittsburgh Foundation with the Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Grant with a space donation from The Space Upstairs and the Braddock Carnegie Library. During this time I was also collaborating with choreographers and artists, Marjani Forte-Saunders, Kate Watson Wallace, Jennifer Meridian, Ayanah Moor, and Julien Prévieux, and working with my grandmother, Claudette Johnson and videographer, Paul Kruse to put together video series, MEMORY KEEP(H)ER.
