About the Artist

Jill Sifah Sigman is a choreographer, performing artist, visual artist, educator, and activist whose polyvalent work blends dance, visual art, ecology, and philosophy. She has a holistic vision of choreography that integrates human bodies, more than human neighbors such as plants, birds, and soil, and objects that people throw away in ways that catalyze connection and care. By placing her body in somatic discourse with the things we discard she aspires to mend our broken connections to earth and each other. 

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Sigman founded jill sigman/thinkdance in 1998 to raise pressing social issues through the body. In 2016, she founded Body Politic, a program of workshops and laboratories collaborating with activists in environmental, immigration and racial justice. In 2022, she launched the Social Justice Movement Lab for artist-activists to center embodiment in social change work. She is the author of Ten Huts, published by Wesleyan University Press, about choreographing structures out of waste in different parts of the world. 

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Sigman has been the first Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney Dance, a Distinguished Guest Artist at the University of San Francisco Performing Arts & Social Justice program, a Center for Creative Research Artist in Residence at NYU, a Choreographic Fellow at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, a Rauschenberg Residency artist, a Movement Research Artist in Residence, a NYFA Fellowship recipient in Environmental Structures, and a 2025 Bessies NY Dance and Performance Awards nominee. She is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University and a member of the Global Performance + Sound Lab at Rutgers-Newark. Sigman was born and raised on occupied Canarsee-Lunaape land in Brooklyn, New York.