mayfield brooks (they/them) improvises while Black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City, NY. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie Award nominee for their experimental dance film Whale Fall, and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-23 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and will be the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.