Justine A. Chambers

Justine A. Chambers (1975; she/her/hers) is a bi-racial Black dance artist and educator living on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and səlilwətaɬ Nations. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her most recent works are activations of the aesthetic practices of Black vernacular line dance and Black dandyism as de-colonial imaginings. Her choreography is concerned with the provisional questions: “What If?” And “Now what?” as processes towards imagining otherwise. Chambers’s work has been hosted by Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Western Front, Sophiensaele (Berlin), National Arts Centre, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at University of British Columbia, Tek Gallery at Simon Fraser University, Artspeak Hong Kong Performing Arts Festival, Agora de la Danse, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, and Art Museum at University of Toronto. She was the recipient of the Lola Dance Award (2017), Chrystal Dance Prize (2017 & 2023) and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2023. She is currently an instructor at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and completing an MFA in interdisciplinary art. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.