interdisciplinary artist | educator
bio.
Alethea Pace is a Bronx-based multidisciplinary choreographer and performer committed to creating work in and with her community that is rooted in social justice. She is a 2025 Harlem River Artist in Residence, a 2024 MAP Fund Recipient, a 2023-2025 Civic Practice Partnership Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was a recipient of the 2021 Dance Magazine Harkness Promise Award. Her work has been presented by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, BAAD!, Works and Process at the Guggenheim, Pregones Theater, Dancing While Black, Danspace Project, New York Live Arts and the 92Y, to name a few.
As a dancer, Alethea has performed with a variety of choreographers and was a member of Arthur Aviles Typical Theatre for eight years. She has been a collaborator in numerous multimedia community-centered projects including with Angela’s Pulse, Dancing in the Streets and the Laundromat Project. She worked as an associate producer on the award-winning documentary Down A Dark Stairwell directed by Ursula Liang, and is an adjunct professor at Lehman College.
Alethea trained at Mind-Builders Creative Arts Center in the Bronx, and has a BA in Urban Design from NYU and an MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Arts from the City College of New York. She has worked as a guest teaching artist at DanceLab NY, Manhattan College, Hunter College and Rutgers University, and is an adjunct professor at Lehman College.
As an interdisciplinary, movement-based artist, my inquiry is grounded in an embodied practice that seeks answers within bodily knowledge, collective memory, and historical study. While grounded in a hybrid of movement forms— contemporary modern dance and dances of the African diaspora— I take an interdisciplinary approach that includes experimentation with text, video, projection mapping, sound design, creative coding, oral history, walking tours and cultural organizing. I investigate how our histories reside in our bodies, how our bodies shape and are shaped by the places they inhabit, and how bodies moving in nontraditional spaces inspire new ways of seeing.
Over the past year, I have been developing a research framework called Listening With, which takes a holistic and process-centered approach to making. It emphasizes the transformative power of deep listening in relationship to the body, the land, the archive, and the community. This framework serves as the foundation for how I rehearse, write, collaborate, and organize—placing multidirectional and interdependent exchanges at the core of the work.
