About

April Biggs (MFA) is a Southern, queer, disabled dance artist, writer, and disability consultant who splits her time between the unceded territories of the Kiikaapoi peoples, colonially known as Milwaukee, WI, and the Lenapehoeking peoples, colonially known as NYC. April is the inaugural recipient of the 2022 A-Ibanez Dance Artist Residency (VA), and was a 2020 Dance/NYC Disability.Dance.Artistry.Dance and Social Justice Fellow, and a 2006 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Swing Space grant recipient. From 2005-2014, she made dance work under the moniker Biggs & Co., presenting several dance works and evening-length productions in venues across NYC and the Greater & Western NY regions including Movement Research, DTW (now NYLA), Dixon Place, the Merce Cunningham Studios, and the ALT Theatre. Now as a project-based artist, her current choreographic projects range in scope— Sick Gurl, an autoethnographic and interdisciplinary solo that explores her disabled body as a site of chimeric world-breaking / world-making; and a (non)exhaustive guide of why we care, a movement, text, and oral work made through remote and in-person collaboration with Dani Cole that navigates care work, accessibility, chronic illness and disability in the pandemic/post-pandemic performance world. In her 20+ years in the professional field she has also performed the work of Bebe Miller, Doug Varone, Ronald K. Brown, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Michael Helland, Anne Burnidge, Third Rail Projects, Valerie Norman, and silverbrown dance, among others.

April’s dance pedagogy and advocacy work is situated in a framework of Disability Justice, an intersectional lens that centers the most marginalized and celebrates the nuanced, full and exquisite experiences of disabled people. Through a lens of “access-imagining”, she has taught contemporary technique, improvisation, composition, contact improvisation, ballet, dance history and pedagogy extensively throughout the US in both community and academic settings, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University at Buffalo, and Ohio State University. She holds a BFA in Dance from Florida State University, an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from The New School, and an MFA in Dance from the Ohio State University where she attended as a University Fellow. In Columbus, Ohio, she also facilitated the Contact Improv Jam from 2015-2018.

April serves on the Artistic Advisory Board of The Field Center and on the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) Dance & Disability Task Force, and has served on grant funding panels and as an NHSDA adjudicator. She is a development and disability consultant to Rutgers University’s nascent Integrated Dance Minor, a member of Creating New Futures’ (CNF) Disability+ Working Group, an Envisioning Coordinator for Dance Artists’ National Collective (DANC). She has presented on disability in dance at the 2022 National Performance Network (NPN) Annual Conference, 2021 NDEO National Conference, 2021 Dance/NYC Digital Symposium, 2021 Dance/USA Virtual Conference, the 2020 Arts Midwest/Western Arts Alliance Joint Conference, and the 2018 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Conference.

April is a published dance critic and poet, is amidst writing a memoir, and directs a virtual multi-genre writing collective. She engages in support and fundraising for both her Cystic Fibrosis and bilateral lung transplant communities at any possible opportunity. She lives with her wife, their cat and two dogs, and is waist-deep in thriving in this one bodymind lifetime.

You can find her CV here.