• BA, State University of New York at Buffalo

Chanon is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo. She is a Bessie nominated choreographer and served as Co-Artistic Director and Ensemble Member of Urban Bush Women.  Chanon is an investigative-innovator in the tradition of makers that have used the arts to unmask history, mend, learn and access liberation.  Chanon makes by way of dance-theatre, visual design, and the curation of art-based communal practices that encourage play, self-reflection and engagement with jazz as an organizing aesthetic. 

Choreographic credits include “Haint Blu,” “Hair and Other Stories” (UBW), “The Priestess of Twerk,”  “Chronicle X” (Nia Witherspoon),“The Hang” (HERE Arts, Taylor Mac, Niegel Smith), “Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville” (La Mama, Talvin Wilks) “The Invention of Tragedy” (Flea Theatre, Meghan Finn). Performance-Collaborator Credits include, Dancing with Glass - The Piano Etudes (Pomegranate Arts), Snake Hips in our DNA (Talvin Wilks), Jazz Mobil (Mickey Davidson), A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (Taylor Mac, Niegel Smith),  Cotton Club Parade (Warren Carlye), God’s Trombone (Craig Harris), and the Tony award winning musical Fela! (Bill T. Jones).

Chanon instructs Collaborative Practice and Embodied Research. She also instructs jazz by way of examination of its African American founding practices,  Additionally, Chanon leads the THD Urban Bush Women and Theatrical Jazz Residency, an annual two-week residency where THD students engage with UBW technique and repertory, process-oriented art making, and Choreopoem traditions. 

Currently, Chanon engages site responsive performance practice as a portal to engage and investigate artmaking and story holding processes, with consideration to individual, interpersonal, structural, and communal health.  This work both inherits and interrogates the traditions of Theatrical Jazz and Ritual Performance, to further the consideration of Care as Organizing practice.  As we embody the archive and recall ancestral memory, how can we attend to the well-being of the artist-conduit and  audience-participants with intention and strategy?