I am based in Seattle’s historically Black Central District, a place my family has called home since migrating north in the 1960s. As a professional dancer, I have navigated as both a company and freelance artist. My work is a proud, loving, response to my environment as well as to my overlapping identities as a Black queer woman. Memory is malleable and history can often be erased unless documented by those who care for it. I create to ensure that we are remembered in the future. My art is for my future selves to know that we are dynamic people interwoven into the fabric of all things beautiful, not just a fluctuating percentage. I create so that I can join the lineage of Black artists, aunties, and makers that “carry it forward” through the body and voice. I collect oral histories as another way to document our lives.  Often these oral histories are reinscribed through my body and put in conversation with movement. I have found that when dance meets the stories I gather, the body unearths sensations and connections that wouldn’t have been activated otherwise. The legacies I engage with can be personal or public; regardless of the proximity, preserving these histories through art becomes an act of resistance to erasure.