Movement artist and writer Bhumi B Patel is a PhD candidate in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University (she/they). She directs pateldanceworks and is a queer, desi, home-seeker, and science fiction choreographer. In its purest form, she creates performance works as a love letter to her ancestors. While Patel has trained in Western forms, she seeks to create movement at the intersection of embodied research and generating new futures, using improvisational practice for voice and body as a pursuit for liberation. Patel tends to her desires to create liberatory, nourishing community spaces through dancing, choreographing, curating, teaching, and scholarship.

Patel earned her MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University and her MFA in Dance from Mills College. She is a member of Dancing Around Race, founded by Gerald Casel, and engages with curatorial practices for both performances and written publications. Patel’s work has been presented at Movement Research (NY), The Asia Pacific Dance Festival (Manoa, Hawai’i), Urban Arts Space (Columbus, OH), Human Resources (LA), CounterPulse (SF), Joe Goode Annex (SF), RoundAntennae (Berkeley), SAFEhouse Arts (SF), max10 (Santa Cruz), RAWdance's Concept Series (SF), The San Francisco International Arts Festival, Berkeley Finnish Hall, PUSHfest (SF), Shawl-Anderson’s Queering Dance Festival (Berkeley), and Deborah Slater’s Studio 210 Residency (SF). Bhumi has been a Lead Artist with SAFEhouse Arts, an Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow, and a Women of Color in the Arts Leadership through Mentorship Fellow. In 2023, Bhumi collaborated with Petra Kuppers to create Co-Dreaming: Improvisation toward Liberatory Worlding, a symposium facilitated in Michigan and the Bay Area.

Her research has been presented at the Dance Studies Association annual conference, Performance Studies international, the Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference, the National Women's Studies Association annual conference, the Popular Culture Association annual conference, the International Conference on Movement and Computing and other symposia. Patel been published in Performance Research Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance. She serves as Editorial Assistant for Choreographic Practices. Bhumi is a 2022-2023 Dance/USA Fellow and a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Making art is her way of tracing the deeply woven connections in which we live–past, present, future–as a way to build communities of nourishment and care.
 

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Selected Publications

• Patel, Bhumi. 2024. “Queer, Brown Dancing Bodies in a White Cube: Refusal and Mourning in Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance.” Performance Research Journal, 28 (5): 110-117.
• Patel, Bhumi. 2024. “Seeking the Endless Possibilities of Gay Indian Nightlife - Khubchandani, Kareem. 2020. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife.” Asian Dance Journal, 12 (71): 115-118.
• Patel, Bhumi. 2024. “Curation as Care.” In Dance: Winter 2024, February 2, 2024. https://dancersgroup.org/2024/02/curation-as-care/. 
• Patel, Bhumi and Jessica Ray Herzogenrath. 2023. “Locating Popular Dance and Dance in Popular Culture,” in Dance in US Popular Culture, edited by Jen Atkins. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge.
• Patel, Bhumi. 2023. “‘To exist is to survive unfair choices:’ The OA and Queer Acts of Protest” in Dance in US Popular Culture, edited by Jen Atkins. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge.
• Patel, Bhumi. 2023. “Gender is a Drag: Performing Hybridity on RuPaul’s Drag Race” in Dance in US Popular Culture, edited by Jen Atkins. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge.
• Patel, Bhumi. 2022. “somewhere in between.” Life as a Modern Dancer, November 4, 2022. https://blog.lifeasamoderndancer.com/2022/11/somewhere-in-between-bhumi-b-patel.html. 
• Patel, Bhumi. 2022. “on teaching improvisational practice: dispatch from August 2022.” Life as a Modern Dancer, August 28, 2022. https://blog.lifeasamoderndancer.com/2022/08/on-teaching-improvisational-practice-dispatch-from-august-2022.html. 
• Patel, Bhumi. 2022. “in search of a decolonial performance praxis.” Stance on Dance (1): Spring/Sum 2022, 9-14.
• Patel, Bhumi. 2022. “offerings through the portal.” Write Your Future: Collected Essays from 2021-2022 Pepatián: Bronx Art Collaborative. New York: Pepatián.
• Patel, Bhumi. 2020. “Let us eat cake, consensually, that is.” Contact Quarterly, Summer/Fall 2020. https://contactquarterly.com/contact-improvisation/newsletter/view/let-us-eat-cake-consensually-that-is#$.  

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Selected Choreographies

• 2024 
  • ghosts of camille (excerpt for Yerba Buena Gardens Festival’s ChoreoFest)
• 2023
  • river remembers (performed as part of when the landscape falls away, curated by KT Nelson)
• 2022-2023   
  • fault lines
    • fault lines: desecrated temple (University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, HI)
    • fault lines: moon portals (HR, Los Angeles, CA)
    • fault lines: broken maps (Urban Arts Space, Columbus, OH)
    • fault lines: quaking (Movement Research, New York, NY)
    • fault lines: edge of the continent (San Francisco, CA)
    • fault lines: witness (San Francisco, CA)
• 2021
  • witness
  • to leave the land: an immersive installation of divisions the empire has sown
• 2020
  • the long shadow: site-specific outdoor performance
  • the long shadow: a virtual project of divisions the empire has sown 
• 2019 
  • divisions the empire has sown 
  • zero 
• 2018 
  • all the things we’ll never be 
  • fellow traveller 
  • sari/sorry 
• 2017
  • remaining tender 
  • Black Holes