Chell Parkins

Chell Parkins is a dance advocate, educator, choreographer, and performer dedicated to lifting the voices of marginalized communities utilizing dance and social media. Parkins travels regularly to the mountains of Guatemala to mentor university students as they perform and conduct movement workshops at elementary schools in K'iche communities. This project provides opportunities to train students working from a culturally respectful standpoint while developing an understanding of the needs of the communities served. WanderlustDance, her ongoing choreographic project, explores transmedia platforms for sharing virtual and corporeal travel dance experiences while incorporating motion capture technology to manipulate live video in performance. She has choreographed and performed versions of this work at the Millennium Forum in Northern Ireland, ZAWP, and AZALA in the Basque region of Spain, in front of the Guggenheim Bilbao, and with students at the Tennessee Dance Festival. In June 2019, she travels to Puerto Rico to create the most recent version of WanderlustDance, focusing on Puerto Rico's complex political history and ongoing recovery efforts after Hurricane Maria. As a dancer, she has performed with MADCO, Steamroller, Bibliodance, Forklift Danceworks and in the film Bernie with Jack Black. Her choreography has been featured in Dancers' Footwork Bread and Butter Series, MOMFest, Frontera Fest, Dance Carousel, Coen's New Works Festival, and Big Range Dance Festival.