Whether creating a solo improvisational piece, or collaborating with other artists for a performance project, Joy brings her passion and experience in dance, somatics and the Tamalpa Life/Art process into her interdisciplinary art practice. Joy’s art process is about learning, dialog, and engagement, asking questions such as “What does it mean to be an authentic embodied artist in today’s culture?” Joy’s teaching approach is holistic --- a deep process of developing awareness from self to other, embracing fragmentedness, and opening to new possibilities for wholeness in body, mind, spirit. Joy facilitates students in the Tamalpa Life/Art training through the process of discovery and connectedness, from inner sensing to outer expressiveness and response-ability.

Joy has danced with Anna Halprin's Performance Company and has also performed with various groups in the Bay Area, including Open Experiments Dance Ensemble, Oakland Improv Collective, and ODC Summerfest. She has appeared in Daria Martin’s film, Minotaur. She is artistic director of Swimming the Waters and co-produced Between Shadow and Light, site-specific performance projects in the San Francisco Bay Area. Joy is a Certified Movement Ritual instructor. She teaches Movement Ritual/ Releasing Creativity classes at 321 Divisadero and has led Movement Ritual summer workshops for students from all over the world.

Joy migrated from the Philippines and has lived in San Francisco for the past twenty years. She is pursuing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. She is currently working on a cultural project that explores the postcolonial body and multi-cultural identity. She hopes to present a performance piece and develop pedagogy to integrate the East-West experience of loss, desire, and transformation.

‹‹ Previous Profile | Next Profile